OPINION -
"A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state: the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed"
--United States Constitution, Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights
"Subject only to the police power, the right of the individual citizen to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."
--Constitution of the State of Illinois, Article 1, Section 22
I was mindful of these amendments to the Constitutions of two sovereign entities as I considered recent personal encounters with manifestations of gun control here in Illinois.
The first came about at a gun show in Kane County a couple of weeks ago. My son and I were attending when he saw a very nice Eagle Arms AR-15A2 Sporter Carbine for a very nice price. (The AR 15 is the semi automatic version of the M-16 military rifle. The firearm definitionally illiterate call it an "assault weapon.")
My son is an electrical engineering major at the University of Illinois-Chicago campus and an Illinois National Guardsmen.
He thinks that the National Guard does not afford him an adequate opportunity for rifle marksmanship, and felt that the purchase of this rifle would accomplish two objectives.
One, he would have a rifle, and two, it would be one that was similar in configuration to the one that he might have to use in battle should he be called to active-duty, and afford him the extra margin of practice that might be significant toward going to win a battle or saving his life or those of his comrades.
My son decided he would purchase this firearm and presented his valid Illinois firearm owners identification (FOID) card along with a valid credit card to complete the deal.
The gun dealer saw his Chicago address and perturbedly asserted that he could not sell such a weapon to a person with a Chicago address. I told the gun dealer that there is no such state law forbidding the purchase of such a rifle by any Chicago resident that has a lawful Illinois Firearm Owners Identification card.
The dealer reluctantly conceded this to be true, but he went on to say that Mayor Daley's lawsuits and undercover investigations had created such a hostile atmosphere toward law-abiding gun dealers that he feared selling such a weapon to anyone who lived in Chicago. He pointed out Chicago's and Cook County's ban by ordinance on such guns.
After my initial anger over this back door negation of my sons constitutional rights subsided, I was forced to conclude that while this man was wrong in his assessment of the law in his decision not to sell the rifle to my son, I was forced to admit that he was being prudent with his assessment of the climate created by Richard Daley’s single-minded obsession with targeting law abiding gun dealers.
The very real possibility of financial ruin at the hand of the Chicago’s Corporation Counsel's office with its bottomless reservoir of tax money to enable the negation of our constitutional rights by bullying gun dealers is not illusory, but real.
I find it curious that only recently has Daley seemed to accept any significant responsibility for the pervasive corruption swirling around the apparent criminal enterprise that much of his administration is, (I breathlessly await his telling us who hired Angelo Torres) but he insists upon holding a law abiding gun dealer financially liable for some gun that he sold 10 or 20 years ago in accordance with the law that subsequently has gone through three or four different owners.
My other encounter was at a forum held in Wilmette, Illinois by the Illinois League of Women Voters. This forum was entitled "Gun Violence and What Can Be Done About It.”
The forum was billed as a panel of "experts" consisting of a public defender who had had members of her immediate family murdered by a juvenile offender, a suburban police chief, an official from the Illinois Council against Handgun Violence, a public health advocate, and a moderator from the League of Women Voters.
The composition of this panel was very curious, since no one from the Illinois State Rifle association or the National Rifle Association was there, nor any academics the like of John Lott, the economics professor who has done an exhaustive study that concludes firearms in private hands are a net benefit society.
I happen to know that these folks also have an interest in the reduction of UNLAWFUL gun violence. (Note my emphasis on the word UNLAWFUL. Gun violence by the law abiding in lawful defense of life is something that I see as POSITVE.)
It became readily apparent that this panel was not about an exchange of ideas to stop the unlawful use of firearms, but about infringing what the Second Amendment says shall not be infringed, namely the right to keep and bear arms.
The first speaker, the public defender, related a painful tale about a juvenile offender who attempted to fraudulently obtain a firearm owners identification card and failed in the attempt. He then broke into a lawyer's office and stole a gun which he used to murder the woman's sister and her husband.
She then went on to inform us of the lifespan of a gun, which she said consisted of the date of its manufacture; it's acquisition by a criminal, and its use in a crime.
She didn't seem to think that there were any other characteristics of a gun that were noteworthy and that there was no benefit to society of gun ownership that was worth mentioning.
She lamented the fact that despite the passage of 20,000 gun-control laws in this country, criminals still have access to guns, and the only logical conclusion that I could draw from her analysis is to end legal access to guns by the law-abiding to defeat criminals. (I suppose it would be impolite of me to point out to her that criminals have access to all manner of illegal drugs such as cocaine and heroin despite their utter prohibition by law to every citizen in the United States.)
By the end of her speech, a logical conclusion that could be drawn from her tragic tale is that her sister and her husband might have benefited by having a firearm to defend them.
The next panelist from the Illinois Council against Handgun Violence cited questionable studies purporting to show that since most Americans don't own firearms, he implied that most citizens would be willing to countenance a tyranny of the majority that would serve as a rationale to negate the protections of the Second Amendment, despite that inconvenient thing about "shall not be infringed.”
He gave us the usual bogus statistics detailing "children" as being up to 19 years old and being killed by "guns", even those that are killed in the course of gang disputes over drug territories. (I wish the United States Army had considered me a "child" back when I was a 19-year-old buck sergeant in Vietnam in command of a 53 ton tank equipped with a 90 mm cannon, a 50 caliber heavy machine-gun, and a 7.62 caliber co-axially mounted machine-gun. I might have been able get away with a lot more stuff that they were willing to consider me has an adult to court-martial me for.)
The Police chief, who is president of the Illinois Association of Chiefs of Police, regaled us with anecdotal tales of officers responding to homes where people had been shot, both accidentally and deliberately, officers forced to defend their lives against criminal offenders with guns, and general criminal misuse of firearms.
He did not generally relate this as to how to prevent handgun violence, but he did caution us that adherence to the "rule of law" demands that if a particular local township or city, under the rubric of police power, establishes a blanket prohibition banning any particular class of firearm, then that premise should be unquestioned and complied with.
I got the feeling that he was a bit uncomfortable with much of the misinformation put forth by the panel, and that he knows from long experience that much of it is untrue.
The moderator from the League of Women Voters (a seemingly humorless woman who was reminiscent of Nurse Ratchett from “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”) wrapped up the discussion by agreeing to take a couple of hand written questions from the audiences that were submitted before the panel commenced speaking.
The first question asked as to how Hale De Mar, the Wilmette resident who used a handgun to successfully defend himself against a burglar who had broken into his home two nights in succession, and had been prosecuted by the Village of Wilmette for violating its prohibition against possession of handguns; would have been benefited by the sort of gun-control advocated by the panel.
What ensued was a classical Jackie Gleason "hommana hommana" moment wherein a full five seconds passed before any panelist responded. They said that since the Village had enacted their unconstitutional handgun ban that was the end of the matter and that he should have used a shotgun or a rifle to blast the miscreant with.
The guy from ICHV cited what may be the most often cited example of social junk science ever, the Kellerman study which purports to show that you are 22 times more likely to be a victim of firearm related death if you keep a gun in your home than someone who does not. There were loud howls of disagreement from the audience after this turkey was invoked, and my friend, Rich Johns of rose to display a T shirt inscribed with the slogan of “Criminals for Gun control.”
The moderator then admonished the audience in a tone that would have suited David Copperfield’s headmaster Creakle by warning “If you don’t behave, we will turn off the microphones.” The discussion than ceased and devolved into groups of folks engaging the panelists in individual discussions.
Rock solid 2nd Amendment supporter WLS radio talk show host Teri O’Brien was in attendance and expressed her sincere condolences to the speaker whose family had been murder victims. She said that she wished that her brother-in-law could have defended himself with a firearm. She responded by saying that O’Brien was insensitive for such a remark and walked away in outrage.
Throughout this entire discussion, the Second Amendment was never once even mentioned as worthy of consideration as an obstacle to any sort of gun-control that they proposed, and as they continually mentioned seizing assault weapons and handguns from the general public they continually said that they did not want to take guns away from anyone.
It brought to mind what the FBI was saying over the loudspeakers at Waco has they assured the people inside the compound that the Combat Engineer Vehicle with the 165mm demolition gun smashing thru the walls that they were not under assault.