SCOTUS takes SAF suit against Chicago
by Dave Workman
Senior Editor
The stage is set for another showdown over gun rights before the US Supreme Court, with oral arguments sometime this coming Winter in the Second Amendment Foundation’s (SAF) lawsuit against the city of Chicago’s handgun ban.
Joining SAF in this legal action is the Illinois State Rifle Association (ISRA) and four individual plaintiffs: Otis McDonald, a Chicago resident since 1952, Army veteran and former head of his union local; Adam Orlov, a former Evanston, IL, police officer; David Lawson, a software engineer living in Chicago for over 25 years, and his wife, Chicago-native Colleen Lawson.
A similar case, filed by the National Rifle Association against Chicago and the neighboring village of Oak Park, essentially remains on hold. SAF filed its lawsuit on June 26, 2008 within an hour after the high court issued its landmark ruling in the District of Columbia v. Heller, upholding the Second Amendment as protective of an individual civil right that extends well beyond service in a militia. It was not until the following day that NRA weighed in with its lawsuit against Chicago and several suburbs, some of which later repealed their handgun ban ordinances to escape that lawsuit.
For several months, the SAF lawsuit had flown under media radar as the press focused on the NRA’s action as if it were the only case. When the court chose to hear the SAF case, it seemed to surprise the press. Coverage of the Supreme Court decision by print and broadcast media almost uniformly omitted any reference to SAF or ISRA.
Indeed, the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal actually got the two cases confused in stories covering the high court’s acceptance of the SAF case, erroneously reporting that this case also challenged the handgun ban in Oak Park, but that is the NRA’s case.
The SAF-ISRA case is McDonald v. Chicago (08-1521).
“SAF was delighted to bring this case in cooperation with the Illinois State Rifle Association and the four local plaintiffs because a gun ban is no less onerous to civil rights in Chicago than it was in the District of Columbia,” said SAF founder Alan Gottlieb. “Such a law cannot be allowed to stand unchallenged.”
The case will be argued by attorney Alan Gura, who also argued the Heller case before the court last year.
“The freedoms we enjoy as Americans are secured to us against violation by all levels of government,” Gura noted. “State and local politicians should be on notice: the Second Amendment is a normal part of the Bill of Rights, and it is coming to your town.”
Not everyone was pleased that the court took the SAF case. Paul Helmke, president of the anti-gun Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, tried to downplay the significance of a potential gun rights victory.
“The Chicago case is unlikely to have much practical impact on most gun laws regardless of how the Court rules,” Helmke said. “Even if the Court were to hold the Second Amendment applicable to states and localities, such a ruling is unlikely to change the crucial holding by the Supreme Court in Heller that a wide range of reasonable gun laws are presumptively constitutional, and that the Second Amendment right is narrowly limited to guns in the home for self-defense.”
However, gun rights activists have suggested that incorporation would be devastating to the gun control movement because it would force state and local governments to comply with the amendment’s requirement that the right to keep and bear arms “shall not be infringed.” While the Heller ruling left the door open for some regulation of firearms, an affirmative decision in the McDonald case will open the door to even further litigation, challenging such state and local gun laws to define what might be “reasonable” regulation of privately-owned firearms.
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