Legal self-defense in Chicago: the poor need not apply

The gun rights advocacy community's celebration over the Supreme Court's McDonald decision early this summer is starting to appear (as I worried at the time) to have been premature, at least in terms of the ability of Chicago residents to legally defend their families, lives, and homes.  If Mayor Daley is to be forced to allow legal guns in Chicago, he'll at least impose a de facto ban on their ownership by the poor.  Just as we discussed happening in Washington D.C., post-Heller, the mayor and his minions are finding myriad ways to attach fees to the exercise of the Constitutionally guaranteed, fundamental human right of the individual to keep and bear arms.

Back at the beginning of July, blogger Thirdpower wrote about Chicago's replacement gun laws.  The list is actually a bit long to reprint here, but let's look at a few "highlights," focusing especially on those that add to the cost of gun ownership, shall we?

• Under Daley's ordinances, handgun owners would need to register all their guns with the city so police know how many weapons are in each home, and would also be required to have a valid Firearm Owner's ID card.  [registration is $15 per gun, and the guns have to be re-registered every three years]
  
• It requires firearms training, both in a classroom and a firing range.  [Anecdotal reports from IllinoisCarry.com price the training at about $100 (and 5 hours), and the gun range portion of the training cannot be done in the city, because the new law bans shooting ranges within city limits--if you can't afford to own a car, tough luck for you]
  
• To protect the city against costs for a lawsuit in case a police officer shoots an armed person while responding to a home, Daley also said the city will pursue legislation at the state and federal levels granting liability immunity for first responders and the city.  [OK--not really cost-related, but the idea of police being granted immunity for shooting people is so outrageous it has to be pointed out]
• Would-be gun owners must take a training course with a minimum of one hour on the range and four hours in the classroom before obtaining a permit to a keep a weapon in the home.  [This, mind you, is a separate requirement from the training time to own a handgun--this is part of a brand new requirement, the "Chicago Firearms Permit (CFP)," now required for ownership of any firearm in Chicago, and in addition to the cost of training (don't forget ammo, range fees, etc.), there is a $100 fee for the permit, which is good for three years (after which another $100 will be required)
  

Ouch--that's getting kinda pricey, before we even get into the cost of the gun itself (which, remember, you'll have to leave Chicago to get--more gas money, and hope you have a car).  The most unforgivable outrage here, of course, is that in pricing the poor out of the legal self-defense market, Chicago would leave those most vulnerable to crime unable to effectively defend themselves against it.

As we've discussed before (and again here), imposing prohibitive costs on the exercise of the Second Amendment is, like the poll tax, inherently racist, because ethnic minorities tend to disproportionately occupy the the lower economic strata.  To quote Roy Innis, National Chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE):

To make inexpensive guns impossible to get is to say that you're putting a money test on getting a gun. It's racism in its worst form [another way Chicago has given itself the power to make gun ownership prohibitively expensive lies in the fact that the city can designate any given handgun as "unsafe," and thus not "registrerable"--care to wager against the possibility of the "unsafe handgun" list being populated mostly by the more economical guns--just as was done with Tennessee's Reconstruction-Era "Army-Navy Law," and the Gun Control Act's provision against "Saturday Night Specials"--in both cases intended to disarm the poor, and thus blacks, as well.]

Bizarrely, Chicago has also chosen to make guns difficult to get rid of--a puzzling course of action, for folks who  clearly want Chicago to be "gun-free."  It's not enough for the Chicago Police to know where all the guns in Chicago are--they also demand to know where guns that have left Chicago have gone--when you sell or otherwise transfer one of your Chicago-registered firearms, you are to fill out a "Firearms Disposition Form," with identifying information about the buyer (something to think about, if one is considering buying a gun from a Chicago resident).  While this ridiculous, abominable requirement has always been in place, at least before, one could accomplish the paperwork by mail.

No longer--now, again, from IllinoisCarry.com, this must be done in person, at only one police station in all of Chicago, and it must be between the hours of 8:30 and 3:30 on a weekday (work a 9-5 job?  Guess you'll have to take a day off--add that to the "cost" column).  Again, I hope you have a car--public transportation to the one police station set up to handle compliance with this egregious requirement doesn't seem all that great:

I would like to add that for those who must use public transportation and prefer the train, the nearest CTA train station is the Orange line, Kedzie stop. If you're coming from the north side, you'll have to ride to the Loop first and then transfer to the Orange line heading south in the direction of Midway Airport. According to Google Maps, it's about a three minute walk from the train station to 4770 S. Kedzie [address of the station].

And if you're thinking of just blowing off the "disposition form" requirement (and who could blame you?), you could have other problems, at least if the gun you are parting with was already registered with the city.  If the registration on one of your registered guns expires, and they have no disposition form on record, they have been known to reject new firearm registration applications.

The lesson from that?  One approach would be to simply not bother registering the guns in the first place--just as many good, peaceable (but "criminal," according to the city) Chicagoans have done for years, but in the (admittedly unlikely) event that you are caught with that "undocumented firearm," you'll pay a steep price for insisting on the capability of defending oneself, without having asked permission first. 

Several of these requirements are now being challenged (also see here, here, and here), but if those challenges ultimately fail, the fact that McDonald "incorporated" the Second Amendment means that  if such restrictions are ruled Constitutional in Chicago, they'll be Constitutional (supposedly) everywhere.

As gun rights advocates, we have a great deal of fighting ahead of us.  Let's get to it.