| Chicago versus the Second Amendment |
Mayor Daley Threatens to Shoot the Messenger—Namely, Me
Posted by Mick Dumke on Thu, May 20, 2010 at 4:32 PM
Mayor Daley loves to bag on the local media, and given my recent line of inquiry into his politics and policies, I’ve never expected to be greeted with a fruit basket at City Hall.
But even I was a bit taken aback this morning when the mayor grabbed a rifle and threatened to shoot me.
The mayor was holding a press conference to discuss what the city was doing to prepare for the Supreme Court’s expected decision to overturn the city’s gun ban. The short answer: all sorts of things, but we’ll just have to wait until the court weighs in next month to find out the details. “We’re hoping for the best,” Daley said.
Guns are one of the mayor’s favorite soapbox topics—he regularly goes out of his way to point out that he despises gun manufacturers and “extremists” like the NRA. “It’s really amazing how powerful they are,” he said today, standing next to a table covered with handguns, rifles, and even a machine gun that police had seized. “They’re bigger than the oil industry, bigger than the gas industry, bigger than Google, bigger than President Obama and the rest of them."
Daley also likes to highlight what he considers to be flagrant hypocrisy on the part of the defenders of gun rights. “Now you can’t walk into the Supreme Court—you have to walk in the side way. They’re going to barricade the doors or something now. I mean, they’re barricading the doors but they’re saying everyone else should have guns. That’s the thing that bothers me in Washington. As you know in Washington all things are being barricaded, all federal buildings. But they’re saying everybody else should be able to carry guns.”
But even supporters of tough gun regulations—myself included—have to admit that it's not clear how much they reduce violence. Despite having some of the most restrictive laws in the country, Chicago is a national leader in shootings and murders, and the mayor himself noted that “we’ve seen far too many instances in the last few weeks” of firearm violence, including the shooting that left a cop dead last night.
So I asked: since guns are readily available in Chicago even with a ban in place, do you really think it’s been effective?
I’m hardly the only guy who asks the mayor things he doesn’t want to answer, and I’ve been responsible for at least one of his huffing, puffing, ranting tangents, which generally get the press corps laughing, thus enabling him to move on to the next question without giving a real answer to the one at hand.
But even by those standards, this was a masterful and surreal performance.
“Oh!” Daley said. “It’s been very effective!”
He grabbed a rifle, held it up, and looked right at me. He was chuckling but there was no smile.
“If I put this up your—ha!—your butt—ha ha!—you’ll find out how effective this is!”
For a moment the room was very, very quiet. I took a good look at the weapon. It had a long bayonet. (Was it seized during the Civil War?)
“If I put a round up your—ha ha!”
The photographers snapped away. Suddenly everybody started cracking up.
Daley went on. “This gun saved many lives—it could save your life,” he said—meaning, I think, that getting that gun off the street might have saved many lives, including mine.
And he went on some more. “We save all these guns that the police department seizes, you know how many lives we’ve saved? You don’t realize it. First of all, they’re taking these guns out of someone’s hands. They save their own life and they save someone else’s. You cannot count how many times this gun can be used. Thirty, forty times in shooting people and discharging a weapon. I think it’s very important.
“Next will be hand grenades, right? We’ll say that hand grenades are OK. I mean, how far can you go in regards to mass weapons? To me, any gun taken off saves thousands of lives in America. I really believe that, I don’t care what people tell me. You have to thank the police officers for seizing all these weapons. We lead the country in seizing weapons. This is unbelievable.”
I had to agree.
Tags: Mayor Richard M. Daley, guns, gun ban, National Rifle Association, Supreme Court, murders, police, crime, politics, Chicago politics
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Chicago Mayor Richard Daley Threatens to Shoot Reporter at Gun Control Event
By Lachlan Markay ( Bio | Archive) Fri, 05/21/2010 - 19:27 ET
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- In a bizarre attempt to demonstrate how vital gun control is in his city, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley threatened to stick a bayonted rifle up a reporter's rear end and pull the trigger. Of course if a Republican had done the same to demonstrate the conservative position on gun control, there would be a media bonanza. Not so for the Democratic mayor.
"If I put this up your—ha!—your butt—ha ha!—you’ll find out how effective this is!" Daley told Mick Dumke of the Chicago Reader. Dumke had posed the very sensible question of how the city's draconian restrictions on gun ownership had helped, given that firearms are still widely accessible, and used in violent crimes throughout the city.
Daley didn't seem to understand the question; he went on about how many lives the confiscation of guns saves, while ignoring the reporter's point that gun control doesn't take firearms out of the hands of criminals. Or, for that matter, politicians peeved with reporters for asking inconvenient questions (video of the exchange below the fold).
...even supporters of tough gun regulations—myself included—have to admit that it's not clear how much they reduce violence. Despite having some of the most restrictive laws in the country, Chicago is a national leader in shootings and murders, and the mayor himself noted that “we’ve seen far too many instances in the last few weeks” of firearm violence, including the shooting that left a cop dead last night.
So I asked: since guns are readily available in Chicago even with a ban in place, do you really think it’s been effective?
I’m hardly the only guy who asks the mayor things he doesn’t want to answer, and I’ve been responsible for at least one of his huffing, puffing, ranting tangents, which generally get the press corps laughing, thus enabling him to move on to the next question without giving a real answer to the one at hand.
But even by those standards, this was a masterful and surreal performance.
“Oh!” Daley said. “It’s been very effective!”
He grabbed a rifle, held it up, and looked right at me. He was chuckling but there was no smile.
“If I put this up your—ha!—your butt—ha ha!—you’ll find out how effective this is!”
For a moment the room was very, very quiet. I took a good look at the weapon. It had a long bayonet. (Was it seized during the Civil War?)
“If I put a round up your—ha ha!”
The photographers snapped away. Suddenly everybody started cracking up.
Daley went on. “This gun saved many lives—it could save your life,” he said—meaning, I think, that getting that gun off the street might have saved many lives, including mine.
Daley's performance raises three distinct issues: first, if this were a Republican trying to make the point that Daley accidentally did -- that gun control is dangerous because it gives the law-abiding citizen little immediate recourse when someone threatens to bayonet his behind -- he would be lambasted by the media. So far, they are silent on Daley's bizarre showing. More consequentially, Daley's behavior is the epitome of the irresponsible treatment of firearms. Any gun owner will tell you that they are not toys, and are to be treated with respect at all times. Moe Lane wonders if the press conference attendees, who chuckled at Daley's antics, would "continue to laugh the next time a kid who hasn’t been taught gun safety imitates Mayor Daley’s behavior, only with a loaded pistol instead of a bayoneted rifle." Daley also gave the attendees of that event a primer in the dangers of restrictive gun control laws, such as Chicago's. As Ed Morrissey writes, he "couldn't have designed a better demonstration" for the necessity of the Second Amendment.
The Second Amendment exists for two reasons. First, the founders knew that law enforcement couldn’t defend everyone against attack — unless they created a police state that would eliminate liberty forever. They encouraged people to arm themselves, an important move in frontier areas especially, where the writ of law didn’t run very strongly. The police are very good at investigating crimes after they occur, but not in providing personal defense, which isn’t their job.
Secondly, arming the populace makes it much more difficult for those in power to seize property and liberty without due process of law. As Daley aptly demonstrated, when only the government and the criminals have guns, they both can dictate at will without fear of opposition. When a reporter asks a tough question, just wield a gun at him and then later laugh it off as a joke.
On top of this all, Daley illustrated these three points -- media bias, the importance of responsible gun ownership, and the dangers of gun control -- completely unwittingly. He was totally oblivious to the fact that he was reinforcing a number of conservative arguments with his outrageous behavior.
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Stephen P. Halbrook: Chicago versus the Second Amendment
By: Stephen P. Halbrook
OpEd Contributor
February 27, 2010
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| Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, far left, joins other Illinois officials in greeting President Obama at Chicago's O'Hare Airport in 2009.(AP Photo/Paul Beaty) (AP) |
On March 2, the Supreme Court will hear arguments on whether Chicago must respect the Second Amendment “right of the people to keep and bear arms.”
Mayor Richard M. Daley argues that it does not apply there, and that in “an urban landscape, the Second Amendment becomes the enemy of ordered liberty, not its guarantor.”
Ignoring those citizens who may need guns to protect their families in their own homes, Daley conjures a parade of horrors, such as “criminal street gangs with the right to carry guns” using violence “to control the drug trade.”
The Bill of Rights was originally intended to prevent a tyranny by the federal government. But when the Civil War ended slavery, the Southern states passed the Black Codes, which deprived African Americans of basic rights – including gun ownership.
The 14th Amendment to the Constitution was adopted in 1868 to prevent states and localities from violating these rights.
Today, Chicago has its own equivalent of the Black Codes, which it argues is constitutional because everyone is equally deprived of rights. In Chicagospeak, an 1866 petition of freed slaves complaining that South Carolina prohibited them from possessing firearms only sought “an equality requirement.”
But in Congress, Massachusetts Sen. Charles Sumner said they should be protected “in keeping arms” and “in complete liberty of speech” – not that they could be equally deprived of these rights.
That same year, Congress passed legislation protecting the “full and equal benefit” of laws for “personal liberty” and “personal security,” “including the constitutional right to bear arms.” “Full,” not just “equal.”
Introducing the 14th Amendment in Congress, Senator Jacob M. Howard of Michigan referred to “personal rights” like “the right to keep and bear arms,” explaining that the amendment would compel the states “to respect these great fundamental guarantees.”
Without these rights, “a people cannot exist except as slaves, subject to a despotism,” Howard argued. Chicago says this was just Howard’s personal view, even though no one in Congress disputed it and the speech was published on the front page of the New York Times.
Guess who Chicago relies on? The racist opponents of the Fourteenth Amendment. One was Senator Thomas A. Hendricks of Indiana, later President Grover Cleveland’s vice president, who objected to blacks having “civil rights and immunities which are enjoyed by the white people,” including the right to bear arms.
Another was Senator Reverdy Johnson of Maryland, the lawyer for the slave owner in the 1857 Dred Scott case, which refused to recognize African Americans as citizens because it would give them “the full liberty of speech . . ., and to keep and carry arms wherever they went.”
Sen. Henry Wilson of Massachusetts – who later became vice president under President Ulysses S. Grant – complained that Southern militias were “visiting the freedmen, disarming them,” but the city of Chicago would ignore the rest of Wilson’s sentence: “perpetrating murders and outrages on them.” Is that okay?
Enough of the historical company that Chicago keeps. What does Chicago say to the Supreme Court about its gun ban today? Enacted in 1982, it’s quite a success: “Handguns were used in 402 of the 412 firearm homicides in Chicago in 2008.” If that’s a success, what’s a failure?
Its imagination gone wild, Chicago reserves the power to ban “a weapon generally in common use for lawful purposes in one locale (such as a high-powered hunting rifle with precision sighting equipment popular in rural Illinois),” to preclude its “use by Chicago gangs seeking to assassinate rivals.”
Aside from the assumption that any firearm can be demonized and banned, are we to assume that criminals will obey gun laws while oblivious to the laws against murder? Deer hunters who reside in the Windy City had better watch their behinds.
The National Rifle Association is a party in the case, which is titled McDonald v. Chicago. We’ll see what the Supreme Court thinks of Mayor Daley’s disrespect for constitutional rights.
Stephen P. Halbrook is Research Fellow at the Independent Institute (www.independent.org), Oakland, Calif., and author of the book “Securing Civil Rights: Freedmen, the Fourteenth Amendment & the Right to Bear Arms” (The Independent Institute, forthcoming in April).
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Over at The Faculty Lounge, there are some pictures of sit-ins from the early 1960s. Regarding a 1963 sit-in in Jackson, Mississippi, TFL writes: “By one account, members of the all-White Jackson police force stood guard outside, while several FBI agents (the guys in back wearing shades) ‘observed’ from inside. That White guy at the counter, that’s Tougaloo professor and community activist Hunter Gray (John R. Salter) who helped organize the Jackson sit-ins. And that’s blood on his shirt. All of the protesters had been covered in slop, and some were beaten with brass knuckles and broken bottles.”
The non-violent Civil Rights protesters allowed themselves to be beaten in public while the media watched; the images helped win sympathy for the Civil Rights Movement in the North, and proved to be crucial in developing the political will for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
In a limited sense, the media’s presence provided some protection for the protesters; there was never a case in which a civil rights protester was murdered in front of media cameras. At night, when everyone had gone home, things were very different. As Salter later explained:
I was beaten and arrested many times and hospitalized twice. This happened to many, many people in the movement. No one knows what kind of massive racist retaliation would have been directed against grassroots black people had the black community not had a healthy measure of firearms within it.
When the campus of Tougaloo College was fired on by KKK-type racial night-riders, my home was shot up and a bullet missed my infant daughter by inches. We received no help from the Justice Department and we guarded our campus — faculty and students together — on that and subsequent occasions. We let this be known. The racist attacks slackened considerably. Night-riders are cowardly people — in any time and place — and they take advantage of fear and weakness.
Later, I worked for years in the Deep South as a full-time civil rights organizer. Like a martyred friend of mine, NAACP staffer Medgar W. Evers, I, too, was on many Klan death lists and I, too, traveled armed: a .38 special Smith and Wesson revolver and a 44/40 Winchester carbine.
The knowledge that I had these weapons and was willing to use them kept enemies at bay. Years later, in a changed Mississippi, this was confirmed by a former prominent leader of the White Knights of the KKK when we had an interesting dinner together at Jackson.
In the 1970s, I was Southside director of the large, privately-funded Chicago Commons Association. Our primary focus involved assisting minority people in developing sensible community organizations — vis-a-vis schools, city services, anti-crime.
We were opposed by white racist organizations (e.g., Nazi Party) and various youth gangs of many sorts. My staff and I received countless death threats, there were arson attacks on our offices, and, on one occasion, men with weapons came to my home and told my wife and children that they intended to kill me. (I happened to be at work.)
Again, I was glad I had many firearms and, again, we guarded our home and let this be known. We responded to hate calls on the telephone by telling the callers we were quite prepared for them.
For Salter, the right to own a handgun was apparently a crucial part of his ability to exercise his right to defend himself and his family, which was a sine qua non of his ability to stay alive in order to exercise his First Amendment rights to advocate for enforcement of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Yet in modern Chicago, decent law-abiding citizens are forbidden to own handguns. As I detailed in my amicus brief in McDonald v. Chicago (pages 39–45), many people find that a handgun is best choice for family defense, especially in urban areas such as Chicago. As the history of the Civil Rights Movement demonstrates, the denial of the constitutional right to own a handgun could endanger other constitutional rights, particularly the rights of community organizers.
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Representative Kenneth Dunkin (D)
5th District
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Springfield Office: |
| 278-S Stratton Office Building |
| Springfield, IL 62706 |
| (217) 782-4535 |
| (217) 782-4213 FAX |
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| District Office: |
| 1520 N. Wells |
| Chicago, IL 60610 |
| (312) 266-0340 |
| (312) 266-0699 FAX |
| Cook County |
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llinois Bill Forces Firearm Owners to Get $1 Million Insurance Policy
Legislation Increases Costs to Law Abiding Residents
2/11/09
A new Illinois bill represents another assault on the rights of law-abiding firearm owners in the state by forcing them to maintain a $1 million liability insurance policy or risk losing the right to own a firearm.
Most individuals in Illinois, with some exceptions, must obtain a “Firearm Owner’s Identification Card” to legally own a firearm. House Bill 687, sponsored by Representative Kenneth Dunkin (D- Chicago), would force all of those individuals to obtain a $1 million liability insurance policy. This policy would cover any damages that take place from the use of a firearm owned by the individual.
The bill also authorizes the Department of the State Police to revoke and seize the identification card from any firearm owner that does not supply proof of the liability coverage to the Department.
Finally, not only will HB 687 increase the cost of lawfully purchasing a firearm, language in the bill puts owners at risk of liability should their firearm be lost or stolen. The bill states that a person shall be considered an owner until they report any stolen or lost firearms to their local police or sheriff’s department. This means that an owner could be held liable if a firearm is stolen or lost and used prior to their knowledge.
“This is terrible legislation that will harm Illinois’ sportsmen community. Not only will the bill make it cost prohibitive for many to own firearms, it also runs the risk of criminalizing innocent owners,” stated U.S. Sportsmen’s Alliance senior vice president, Rick Story
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| Chicago Tribune |
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| Constitution of the State of Illinois SECTION 22 |
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NRA Eyes More Targets After D.C. Gun-Ban Win
CLICK ON THIS LINK TO HEAR SOMETHING GOOD
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=92008363
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by Libby Lewis
Weekend Edition Sunday, June 29, 2008 · Five cities and suburbs are facing lawsuits challenging their bans on handguns. When the U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark June 26 decision, rejecting Washington, D.C.'s ban on handguns, gun-rights lawyers swung into action.
As a result, the legal landscape for gun laws could face dramatic changes.
The village of Morton Grove, Ill., just north of Chicago, has one of the oldest handgun bans in the nation on its books. It's also the target of one of the five lawsuits filed by the National Rifle Association.
Village Manager Joe Wade says Morton Grove isn't going to wait for a court battle. It's going to act.
"The village of Morton Grove has every intention to comply with [the Supreme Court ruling]," Wade says. "We're going to propose an ordinance that would eliminate the possession-of-handgun ban within the village."
The attitude is different in Oak Park, a suburb on Chicago's West Side that has become another target of NRA lawyers.
"It's just completely befuddling that our Supreme Court would be in alliance with the gangbangers," says Tom Barwin, the village manager in Oak Park.
Barwin used to be a police officer near Detroit. He said he's hoping Oak Park pushes back against the high court ruling. But that might not be easy.
Barwin says e-mail is already coming in from people interested in owning handguns.
He says he expects the village to meet with other communities that might want to fight to continue their bans, in order to figure out where to go next.
Where the NRA is going next is Chicago. The city has a handgun ban nearly identical to the D.C. law struck down by the Supreme Court.
The NRA lawsuit in San Francisco challenges a local ordinance that bars possession of handguns by public housing residents.
How far will the legal challenges go?
Stephen Holbrook, an outside counsel for the NRA, believes it won't be a free-for-all.
"Most laws will stay on the books," Holbrook says. "But that's because they're regulations and not outright bans."
At the same time, Holbrook says there is fertile ground for future challenges, whether by lawsuit or other means.
For instance, he said, Washington, D.C., officials suggested after the ruling that residents wouldn't be able to legally own semiautomatic handguns.
That's not acceptable, Holbrook says.
"The Supreme Court decision refers to handguns generally — not just revolvers," he points out. He says that means it applies to semiautomatic handguns as well, adding that there may be more semiautomatic handguns in use right now in the U.S. than there are revolvers.
And he predicts that if Washington, D.C., tries to use its zoning powers to keep handgun dealers out, that won't work either.
"It would be like if they banned books in D.C. and they told them they couldn't do that, so they banned bookstores," he says.
Still, Holbrook does think many gun regulations will stand.
But David Kairys, who teaches law at Temple University in Philadelphia, thinks differently.
He's a gun-control advocate, and he's an expert on gun laws.
He says the Supreme Court ruling doesn't provide a principle or a theory to help judges or lawmakers figure out what's constitutional and what's not.
Kairys says if he were "thinking as an NRA lawyer" he would conclude that the ruling "throws into question almost every regulation of guns."
Kairys isn't an NRA lawyer. But if he were, he says he would challenge just about every regulation now on the books with two words: self defense.
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Steve Chapman
- June 29, 2008
Thomas Jefferson once wrote, pessimistically, "The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground." He would probably not have been surprised to see the proliferation of gun-control laws in our time. But he might not have anticipated that the water would run back uphill.
Thursday's Supreme Court decision affirming that the 2nd Amendment recognizes an individual right to own firearms for self-defense was a vindication of those who have long argued that position. But it was an even more stunning defeat for advocates of gun control, who not so long ago seemed to have history, law and public sympathy on their side. Back then, they couldn't have dreamed that the Supreme Court would say, "You know what? The National Rifle Association is right."
In the 1980s and 1990s, as violence raged at epidemic levels, the preferred remedy of policymakers was to restrict the manufacture, sale and ownership of firearms. Washington, D.C. had banned handguns in 1976, and in 1982, Chicago did likewise, prompting several of its suburbs to follow suit.
New York required anyone who wanted a handgun to acquire a special permit, which was expensive and hard to get. Meanwhile, the federal government and several states outlawed "assault weapons"—semiautomatic guns with a military appearance.
It looked as though ever-stricter gun control was the wave of the future. But the future had different ideas. What happened? Three main things:
•Gun control didn't work. In the 1990s, despite its draconian ban, Washington became the murder capital of the United States. Chicago's homicide rate, which had been declining in the years before it banned handguns, climbed over the following decade.
During the time the federal assault weapons law was in effect, the number of gun murders declined—but so did murders involving knives and other weapons. When the law was allowed to expire in 2004, something interesting happened to the national murder rate: nothing.
•Laws allowing concealed weapons proliferated—with no ill effects. In 1987, Florida gained national attention—and notoriety—by passing a law allowing citizens to get permits to carry concealed handguns. Opponents predicted a wave of carnage by pistol-packing hotheads, but it didn't happen. In fact, murders and other violent crimes subsided. Permit holders proved to be sober and restrained.
People elsewhere took heed, and today, according to the NRA, 40 states have "right-to-carry" laws. As those laws have spread, the homicide rate has fallen sharply from the peak reached in 1991.
•The 2nd Amendment got a second look. In 1983, a San Francisco lawyer named Don Kates published an article in the University of Michigan Law Review arguing that, contrary to prevailing wisdom in the judiciary and law schools, the Constitution upholds an individual right to keep and bear arms.
Numerous legal scholars, spurred to examine the record, reached the same surprising conclusion. Before long, even some liberal law professors were coming around.
In 2000, Harvard's Laurence Tribe published a new edition of his influential constitutional law textbook, asserting that the 2nd Amendment had an undeniable meaning: "The federal government may not disarm individual citizens without some unusually strong justification consistent with the authority of the states to organize their own militias. That assurance in turn is provided through recognizing a right (admittedly of uncertain scope) on the part of individuals to possess and use firearms in the defense of themselves and their homes . . . "
The majority opinion last week, written by Justice Antonin Scalia, drew heavily on this stack of scholarship to argue that the framers did not limit the right to the context of service in a state militia. Without the stimulus provided by these contrarian thinkers, the decision would never have come to pass. And the 2nd Amendment would have remained what it was for so long: a curious irrelevancy.
Instead, the right to keep and bear arms has finally taken its rightful place with our other fundamental liberties. It may be the natural course of things for government control to expand and freedom to shrink. But as Jefferson knew, America was founded to reverse that process.
Steve Chapman is a member of the Tribune's editorial board. He blogs at chicagotribune.com/chapman
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Suburbs with gun bans split over impact of court ruling
Local officials study the potential impact of the federal decision overturning Washington's law
By James Kimberly and Andrew L. Wang | Chicago Tribune reporters
- 11:55 PM CDT, June 26, 2008
Nate Noel of Elgin practices his target shooting at G.A.T. Guns in Dundee on Wednesday. (Chicago Tribune photo by Jim Prisching / June 26, 2008)
Some Chicago suburbs that have passed handgun bans in the past weren't sure if those laws could be jeopardized by Thursday's U.S. Supreme Court ruling. Others didn't think it would matter either way.
In the years since Morton Grove passed the first handgun ban in the nation in 1981, Evanston, Oak Park, Winnetka and Wilmette also outlawed handguns. Because of the high court's ruling that Washington, D.C., cannot ban people from owning guns, all five suburban bans could now be declared unconstitutional.
Though Chicago officials Thursday vowed to fight any challenges to its 1982 handgun ban, suburban officials said it was too soon to say whether the ruling applied to them. Some felt that overturning their bans wouldn't be a big deal. Still others were outraged, such as Oak Park Village President David Pope, who said the ruling would threaten safety in his near west suburb, which banned gun ownership in 1984.
"The ruling puts [Justice Antonin] Scalia and the four other conservative justices squarely on the side of the gang-bangers who terrorize far too many of urban American neighborhoods today," he said.
More articles
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For Immediate Release: 6/27/2008
BELLEVUE, WA – The Chicago Tribune’s call for repeal of the Second Amendment following the historic Heller Decision is an “unconscionable attack on the entire Bill of Rights and the freedoms it protects,” the Second Amendment Foundation said today.
In an editorial published on the day after the Supreme Court handed down its 5-4 ruling, the newspaper called the Second Amendment an “anachronism” that should be repealed. The newspaper supported its argument by falsely claiming that a 1939 case, U.S. v Miller, established the amendment as a “collective right” that applied only to service in some type of militia.
“The Chicago Tribune’s editors have demonstrated an appalling short-sightedness,” said SAF founder Alan Gottlieb. “If they are so willing to abandon one civil right for an entire class of American citizens, what’s next? Perhaps they would strip some citizens of their First Amendment rights to free speech or religion. Heaven help us should the Chicago Tribune editorial board one day decide that they don’t care for the editorial slant of their competitors at the Sun-Times, and call for a restriction on that newspaper’s freedom of the press.
“Once you make it acceptable to destroy one civil right,” Gottlieb observed, “it does not take a very big leap to embrace limitations on, or the abolition of, another civil right.
“Not once, in all the years that gun rights organizations have been vilified in the editorial columns of the Tribune and other newspapers did anyone from the firearms community suggest we should repeal the First Amendment,” he stated. “Unlike elitist newspaper editors, gun owners understand that the Bill of Rights is an all-or-nothing document, not a civil rights buffet from which we can pick and choose the rights we want to enjoy and those for which we have no stomach.
“We have always known the Second Amendment affirmed an individual civil right, and a truly objective reading of history by the Chicago Tribune would – if they had any notion of objectivity – lead them to the same conclusion,” Gottlieb concluded. “A generation of parents and grandparents of those now writing such nonsense in the Tribune risked, and all too frequently lost their lives to defend all of the freedoms enumerated in the Bill of Rights. The Tribune editors may as well just spit on their graves.”
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