-By Warner Todd Huston
Well, this is an interesting development. Remembering that Illinois is the only state that has a concealed carry ban still on the books, a federal judge ruled the ban unconstitutional and told the state legislature it has180 days to dump the ban and write legislation allowing for concealed carry.
Judge Richard Posner presides over the Seventh Court of Appeals in Chicago and wrote, in part, that the Supreme Court has already ruled that self-protection and, therefore, concealed carry, is an individual right under the Second Amendment. So, Illinois is violating the Constitution.
Still, Posner felt that some restrictions might be OK under the Constitution.
The New York gun law upheld [by the Second Circuit] in Kachalsky, although one of the nation’s most restrictive such laws (under the law’s “proper cause” standard, an applicant for a gun permit must demonstrate a need for self-defense greater than that of the general public, such as being the target of personal threats, id. at *3, *8), is less restrictive than Illinois’s law. Our principal reservation about the Second Circuit’s analysis … is its suggestion that the Second Amendment should have much greater scope inside the home than outside simply because other provisions of the Constitution have been held to make that distinction. For example, the opinion states that “in Lawrence v. Texas, the [Supreme] Court emphasized that the state’s efforts to regulate private sexual conduct between consenting adults is especially suspect when it intrudes into the home.” 2012 WL 5907502, at *9. Well of course—the interest in having sex inside one’s home is much greater than the interest in having sex on the sidewalk in front of one’s home. But the interest in self-protection is as great outside as inside the home. In any event the court in Kachalsky used the distinction between self-protection inside and outside the home mainly to suggest that a standard less demanding than “strict scrutiny” should govern the constitutionality of laws limiting the carrying of guns outside the home; our analysis is not based on degrees of scrutiny, but on Illinois’s failure to justify the most restrictive gun law of any of the 50 states.
So, now we have the newest constitutionality question to reckon with where it concerns the Second Amendment. Does the Constitution protect the right to bear arms both inside and outside the home?
It would seem to any sensible person that it does, but various state laws now are at odds with each other. So sooner or later this new right-to-bear-arms question will likely go up before the SCOTUS to be settled.
Of course, what Illinois Democrats want to stop is everyone but them being allowed to carry a gun at will. As we saw from the fake job that State Senator Donne Trotter got that allowed him to carry a gun.
Chicago’s Republican Party issued a statement after the ruling.
For too long, elected officials in Illinois violated the constitutional rights of citizens. Their laws made basic self defense illegal despite the growing threat of violence in Chicago.
“As the General Assembly re-examines the conceal-carry issue, I urge them to keep the law-abiding residents of Chicago in mind,” said Chicago GOP Chairman, Adam Robinson. “Previous anti-gun legislation made private citizens more vulnerable to violent criminals who had no problem acquiring firearms. New legislation must empower our citizens, not violent criminals.”
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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