Gun Victories in the Midwest…From Detroit to Chicago, the Second Amendment wins

Charles C. W. Cooke:

Conservatives in the frigid Midwest could be forgiven for wondering whether the last week’s cold has been a sign that hell has finally frozen over, for, within a single week they have won big in a pair of cities that had all but been written off. Last Thursday, Detroit’s chief of police, James Craig, discussed openly his conversion on the question of concealed carry, contending happily that “good Americans with CPLs translates into crime reduction” and expressing his hope that private gun owners would help to stem the tide of violence. Monday, across Lake Michigan, a judge struck down Chicago’s ban on gun sales, slamming progressive lawmakers into the bargain. Is Christmas really over?

“When we look at the good community members who have concealed-weapons permits,” Craig explained, “the likelihood they’ll shoot is based on a lack of confidence in this police department.” As a convert, Craig gave testimony that was of particular interest. “Coming from California, where it takes an act of Congress to get a concealed-weapon permit, I got to Maine, where they give out lots of CCWs,” he admitted, “and I had a stack of CCW permits I was denying; that was my orientation. I changed my orientation real quick. Maine is one of the safest places in America. Clearly, suspects knew that good Americans were armed.” To hear this from the police chief of the third most murderous city in the country is progress indeed.

All in all, it has been an unhappy few years for the gun-controllers of America’s more dangerous metropoleis. The Supreme Court’s 2008 D.C. v. Heller decision struck down the total ban on handgun ownership in the nation’s capital and established for the first time that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms. McDonald v. Chicago, a 2010 follow-up case, applied Heller to the rest of the country and nixed Chicago’s gun ban, too.

Since McDonald, Chicago has done rather poorly in court. In 2010, the city’s government sneakily attempted to re-impose its ban by the backdoor, first requiring that permits be awarded only to applicants who had undergone live-fire training, and then banning all the firing ranges at which such training could take place. Within a year, a circuit court killed the measure in Ezell v. Chicago, savagely admonishing the city for its defense; recording for posterity that the claim that firing ranges would do “harm to the public interest is based entirely on speculation” (“a gun range becomes unusually dangerous if one runs into the line of fire but that is also true of vehicular traffic,” the judge wrote, drily); and reiterating Heller’s direct line of equivalence between the First and Second Amendments — a finding that the gun-control movement, which has long insisted that no such line exists, is possibly going to regret having invited. Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s case, that citizens were not being denied their rights because they could go elsewhere to train, was shredded by the judge.

Emanuel’s losing streak continues. In Monday’s district-court ruling, the bench patiently explained to authorities that citizens cannot enjoy their Second Amendment rights if they are prohibited from performing auxiliary behaviors such as buying a firearm and training with it. This principle, first formally established by Ezell, is important. After Heller — which didn’t require courts to apply a specific standard of review when evaluating challenges to gun control — gun advocates wondered aloud whether cities would simply be able to institute de facto gun bans via more narrowly tailored measures. Nationally, the question remains open. D.C., after all, has done precisely that, and with the support of a federal judge. But Chicago has gone the other way — twice.

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