Gun Control: A federal judge rules that the right to keep and bear arms includes the right to buy them — and that while government is obligated to protect its citizens, it must protect their constitutional rights as well.
Chicago's long-standing attempt to deny its citizens their full Second Amendment rights under the U.S. Constitution was met with yet another court defeat. This time, it came via a ruling by U.S. District Judge Edmond Chang that the city ban on retail gun shops owned by licensed dealers went too far to count as a "sensible restriction" on gun ownership to prevent gun violence, in what has arguably become the nation's murder capital.
"The ban on gun sales and transfers," wrote Judge Chang in a 35-page opinion, "prevents Chicagoans from fulfilling, within the limits of Chicago, the most fundamental prerequisite of legal gun ownership — that of simple acquisition." Chang found the city's "blanket ban" on sales and transfers of firearms violated the constitutional right to keep and bear arms.
In a 5-4 decision in 2008, Heller v. District of Columbia, written by Justice Antonin Scalia, the Supreme Court overturned D.C.'s draconian gun law. Similar to Chicago's law, D.C.'s law barred private ownership of handguns, but the Supreme Court reaffirmed that the right to bear arms was indeed an individual constitutional right.
On the heels of Heller, however, a three-judge panel of the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, led by Judge Frank Easterbrook, rejected subsequent suits brought by the National Rifle Association against the city of Chicago and its suburb of Oak Park, Ill., on the grounds that Heller applied only to the District of Columbia and not to the states and their municipalities.
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