The result of the McDonald, & NRA v City of Chicago court case resolved in 2010 with the victory for the plaintiffs against the City, ended up with the now Mayor Rahm Emanuel and the city trying to squirm out of paying the legal fees of the plaintiffs are is required by law.
You may recall the draconian 30 year ban under the then Mayor Daley's watch was overturned.
Back to the present, Mayor Emanuel and his advisers fought the court ruling claiming the NRA were not a "prevailing party", however this is not how the 7th U.S. Appeals court judge saw it. In his ruling, Justice Frank Easterbrook ruled in favor of the NRA, pointing that the NRA who did not get a favorable judgement in the handgun original court case received a favorable decision in the Supreme court, and that trumped any technicality that the City was trying to use to avoid payment. This decision legally entitling the NRA to recover attorney costs from the municipalities of the City of Chicago and the Village of Oak Park.
For a final touch of poetic justice the one time Chief of Staff for President Barack Obama now mayor of the City of Chicago is one of the people that had to sign the checks made out to the NRA to pay for legal fees. Had his arrogance and that of his advisers not been so great, and the accepted the initial decision of the court and not taken it to appeals court, they would have had far less to pay. As it was, the amount came to 1.4 Million dollars.
One can only imagine how much safer the City of Chicago would be had Emanuel and his advisers spent the $1.4 million on crime prevention rather than pointless court cases over handgun control. During this time (2012) the homicide rate in Chicago went up (#499 on the 28 of December 2012), 42 killed in Jan 2013, perhaps due to the squandering of public funds on court cases. Interestingly enough January 1929 at the height of AL Capones era, when only 26 people were killed, while the 42 in Jan of 2013 is not as high as 2002, it still points to failed restrictive firearm policies. 1992 had the highest number of homicides (77) in Chicago, during the time when the city had their draconian gun bans and did not allow citizens to defend themselves. Most of the homicides are attributed to gang violence as was the case in 1929, so little has changed in Chicago in the last 80 years.
An interesting site for checking violence in neighborhoods in Chicago is here
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