In pursuit of the ever-elusive legally owned Chicago-bound handgun, I found myself in a western suburb this weekend going through the NRA Basic Pistol course. I cannot recommend this class highly enough to someone with little practical experience in shooting or weapons safety. The class goes into great detail in examining the constituent parts of revolvers and semiautomatic handguns, spends time discussing safety in detail (as well as legal and ethical liability), shooting stance, grip, correcting shooting errors, assessing the difference between calibers and how to recover from common weapons malfunctions. And that’s just the classroom portion. I ended up having to come back the next day for range time since I misjudged my I-Go reservation, but benefited from the undivided attention of our teacher. Within an hour I had dramatically improved my accuracy with the Glock 17 (and while I originally hated this handgun, it turns out that a proper grip corrects the slide bite and loose accuracy that irritated me at first). As my instructor was certified by Illinois as a firearms instructor, he was able to sign the training affadavit for the Chicago Firearms Permit application.
Next step is turning in the paperwork, I already have an Illinois Firearm Owner’s ID Card so I just have the form to fill out, some photocopies / passport photos / money order to assemble, and then need to show up during weekday business hours at the Chicago Police headquarters to get fingerprinted and turn in my application form. And then, after filling out the form (FOID application) that entitles me to a card (FOID) that entitles me to take a class (pistol training) that entitles me to fill out another form (CFP application) that entitles me to get an expensive piece of paper (CFP) that entitles me to fill out another form (federal form 4473) that entitles me to take possession of a pistol, that entitles me to fill out another form (handgun registration), I’ll finally be able to legally possess a handgun within the city limits of Chicago. The process: asinine. The result: good old fashioned American fun.
Mick Dumke at the Chicago Reader posted a link to the final version of the Chicago gun ordinance as passed by the full City Council today, so I’ve been reading through it to see just how good/bad it is. You can find a PDF copy of the “Responsible Gun Ownership Ordinance” here.
Some points of interest:
- One handgun a month, but you can get as many rifles and shotguns as you can carry home. Too bad most of what I want is handguns.
- Legal to transport handguns and long guns if unloaded, disassembled, encased and not easily accessible.
- City now issues a Chicago Firearms Permit (CFP), that appears to be mostly the same as the Illinois Firearm Owners ID (FOID) but costs ten times as much to obtain and requires four hours of classroom instruction and one hour of range time. Hopefully, unlike the Illinois State Police, they’ll actually give you a new one if you change your address.
- CFP is required for ownership of any firearm, not just handguns. People with existing and valid registrations are grandfathered and don’t have to get a CFP until their certificate expires. If they show that they applied for a CFP prior to their expiration, they will still be considered in compliance until they hear back from the police about the CFP application.
- Applicants for a CFP must hear back within 45 days or the police must show good cause why a delay is required – the exception is for the first 180 days after the passage of the legislation, where they have 120 days to respond. Are they expecting a rush of applications?
- If you want to transport ammunition, you have to have your CFP and registration certificate with you (where said certificate is for a firearm in the caliber of the ammo you’re carrying). This is a good excuse to just have MidwayUSA or Widener’s ship it directly to your door.
- Speaking of ammunition, Chicago considers a more than twelve-round magazine to be “high-capacity” and illegal. But Cook County considers more than ten rounds to be high-capacity. Guess we’ll just have to err on the side of frustration and get the ten-rounders.
- HOLY SMOKES – “an application for a registration certificate shall be submitted no later than 5 business days after a person takes possession within the city of a firearm from any source; provided that any applicant who has submitted a complete application within the required 5 business days shall be considered in compliance with this subsection until his registration certificate is either approved or denied.” This is a complete game changer! Finally, they treat us like humans – buy the gun, fill out the form, keep it at your home while you wait to hear back about the stupid certificate. Before this new ordinance, you had to take possession, keep it at some hidey hole / storage unit / family home outside the city, wait more than a month to get your certificate back, and then bring it home.
- City must respond within 21 days for registration request, but can wait up to 45 days in the first 180 days after legislation is passed. Certificates now last three years instead of one, don’t cost any more, but you have to file a registration report once a year on a form or you could get invalidated.
- Illegal to possess a handgun with “a manufactured weight of 50 ounces or more when the handgun is unloaded“. Guess this is intended to protect against AR-15 pistols and the like, but actually ends up banning perfectly normal, safe and effective self defense weapons like the Ruger Super Redhawk revolver (.44 Mag, 53 oz unloaded), the Smith & Wesson Model 460XVR (72 oz unloaded) and Model 629 Stealth Hunter (7.5″ barrel is 56 oz, the 6.5″ and 6″ barrels are fine). One irony: the IPDA Enhanced Service Revolver division has an upper weight limit of 50 oz. Is Chicago trying to funnel us into competitive shooting?
- Cannot register a handgun that “any handgun that is listed on the superintendent’s roster of unsafe handguns because, in the determination of the superintendent, the handgun is unsafe due to its size, ability to be concealed, detectability, quality of manufacturing, quality of materials, ballistic accuracy, weight, reliability, caliber, or other factors which makes the design or operation of the handgun otherwise inappropriate for lawful use“. So you can’t have a gun that’s too big and you can’t have a gun that’s too small? And now the city’s getting picky about caliber, reliability, accuracy, quality? How snobbish of them..naturally, we’ll have to see how this section turns out in practice. Could be mostly meaningless or a major headache.
- Shooting ranges, galleries, and gun stores illegal in city limits. Pikers. Well, if they want to miss out on the sweet tax receipts, that’s their business – just wait until this provision gets smacked upside the head in court.
All in all, this is a lot better than I had feared. No restriction on semi-automatics, no ballistic fingerprinting requirement, no liability restriction, primary defensive arm can stay loaded and unlocked, registration doesn’t suck anymore, you can finally take home your expensive metal hunks when you buy them and save the paperwork for later. My only fear is the “unsafe gun list” but I’m fully confident that Alan Gura will be watching that one like a hawk.
And now, to celebrate with some Arrogant Bastard Ale (in honor of our not-so-honorable Mayor Richard M. “Shortshanks” Daley).
I’m glad to break my silence during the week of the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision in McDonald v. Chicago to incorporate the protections of the 2nd Amendment to cities and states, and to overturn the Chicago handgun ban. While I wish that city residents and government officials had recognized the idiocy of this policy and moved to correct it through the executive or legislative process (just as Canada is rolling back its gun registry after $2 billion of expenditures that failed to solve any crimes), I am also happy to see official judicial recognition of the right we already knew was there.
But the downside of this decision is letting our foam-flecked screaming halfwit of a mayor attempt to make up new policies on the fly – the proposal he and Mara Georges (the city’s corporate counsel) floated earlier this week involved personal liability insurance for gunowners (!), only one handgun per person per household (hope they never break), a ban on semiautomatic weapons and a requirement that this one handgun be kept unloaded and locked or disassembled. But sometime between earlier this week and early this morning, someone told Daley that Heller v. D.C. resulted in the Court explicitly rejecting a safe storage requirement for handguns – in the version of the ordinance a council subcommittee approved this morning, those proposals were substantially weakened or eliminated.
A life in I.T. and a fascination with politics have both taught me that the devil is in the details, so I’m cautious about the effect of this legislation until I see details that haven’t been filtered through a rubber-stamp city council that is still largely unaware of the proposal’s contents, and haven’t been bullet-pointed by a weapons-ignorant media. In any case I’ll be starting the application process for a permit the moment things are finalized and will update with details of how it goes.
Thursday, February 25, 2010
It’s been nearly a year since I last wrote in this blog, and enough changes have happened in the interim (a cross-city move, major changes in responsibility at my job, economic upheaval, a serious reassessment of some of my political views) that I thought it best to start afresh with my previous content condemned to the circular file. None of it was really worth saving since I never invested any serious effort in trying to make it worth reading.
There is much coming up that is worth discussing: the Supreme Court hears oral arguments in McDonald v. City of Chicago next Tuesday, spring training starts for the White Sox, a battle continues to rage over the Obama administration’s healthcare plan, federal investigators work to bring down this fair city’s political machine, a grey and joyless winter is nearly over and I continue to learn my way around an acoustic guitar. Also, food! And beer! Stay tuned, I hope this will be worth my time and that of my few readers and random Google visitors…