McDonald vs. Chicago: What Constitutes a Win? by Jim Shepherd 3-5-2010
gengberg March 5th, 2010
McDonald v. Chicago: What constitutes a win?Most of the conversational around the industry since Tuesday’s Supreme Court oral arguments in the McDonald v. Chicago case has been pretty optimistic. It seems a foregone conclusion that the Supreme Court will vacate both firearms restriction ordinances in Chicago and its suburb, Oak Park, lllinois.
But there’s been very little said about Otis McDonald, the 76-year old retired maintenance engineer who’s the primary name on a lawsuit that may become yet another fundamental rib in American jurisprudence.
McDonald and his wife live in the far South side of Chicago where they’ve watched their neighborhood deteriorate from familial to downright dangerous. Despite having his home wired with burglar alarms “wired right into the police station” and owning a legal firearm (a shotgun), McDonald said he felt he would be better protected if he also had a handgun. His rationale was simple: a handgun would be easier for an aging husband or wife to handle.
Despite the fact that Chicago police point out the fact that it’s mainly property crimes in his neighborhood, they can’t deny the fact they’ve gotten worse. Burglaries and thefts in McDonald’s area risen from 881 in 2006 to 1,215 in 2008 (the latest figures available). Murders have remained steady at 17 per year.
So, Otis McDonald joined the Illinois State Rifle Association, hoping to find an answer. What he found was attorney Alan Gura, looking for Chicago residents to bring a challenge to the city’s handgun ban - and a broader interpretation to the Heller decision.
For Gura, McDonald was a perfect case, an elderly black man seeking to protect himself and his neighbors in a neighborhood going downhill. McDonald, on the other hand, saw the situation as an answered prayer. Today, he still maintains his reason for wanting the ban overturned was a simple one, “I was doing this for me.”
As expected, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against McDonald and the other defendants, holding that the Supreme Court had ruled -more than 100 years ago - that the Second Amendment applied only to the federal government.
Chicago, like other cities with a liberal political philosophy, believes, unlike Otis McDonald, that allowing law-abiding citizens to possess handguns will create a wave of handgun violence, firearms accidents and suicides that trump any possible good a handgun could bring.
In a city where handguns were used in 410 of 412 murders in 2008, it would seem that the criminal element had empirically proven that handguns were more than present in the city. Overwhelmingly by the criminal element.
And as has been pointed out many times, the criminal element isn’t concerned with the law. They are unmoved by boundaries adhered to by law-abiding citizens.
Speaking with the NRA’s special counsel, former Solicitor General Paul Clement, following the oral arguments, he said the argument he presented to the court on behalf of the National Rifle Association (accorded a portion of Gura’s time) was pretty simple “Does,” Clement asked, “a citizen in Chicago have the same right as a citizen in Washington, D.C. We believe the only answer is ‘yes’”.
In presenting the only argument of the morning that wasn’t constantly interrupted by the sometimes sarcastic justices, it would seem Clement made a compelling case for a simple argument.
If the Supreme Court were to find that they didn’t, Clement said, it would be equivalent of the court saying “our decision on Heller really wasn’t all that big a deal.”
No one thinks that likely.
That unlikelihood is despite the fact that the three remaining justices who dissented on Heller still worked - energetically at times- to make the case for gun regulations. As Justice Stephen declared flatly during one of his more vocal points, “guns kill.”
That’s where the philosophical divide between gun owners and gun opponents seems irreconcilable. Continue Reading »
