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.
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