REFLECTIONS ON HELLER, PART IV
I apologize for being kind of in and out on the blog lately. In the eight weeks of June and July, I was on the road for six. Internet, etc. was not always accessible.
It was fun, though, to read some headlines on the ground where the news was taking place. I was driving through Virginia and DC when the Washington Post front page headlined the story of the city’s resistance to the Supreme Court itself. Sure enough, when Dick Heller, the eponymous plaintiff in the landmark Heller v. DC SCOTUS decision went to register his Colt Government Model .45 pistol, he was turned down. Even though he had only seven-shot magazines for it, the District told him it was unacceptable. Don’t you know, they have a separate law in the city banning as “assault weapons” any firearm that can possibly take a larger than twelve-round magazine. They lump them in with prohibited “machine guns.”
Will Dick Heller take them to court again over this? Well, do bears go potty in the woods? And do winos do the same on the streets of the District, for that matter?
The aftershocks of Heller are even more amusing in the Chicago area, where Mayor Daley (aka King Richard the Second) is not handling it well and promises to fight. Uh, yeah. The vehemently anti-gun Chicago Tribune first responded to the Heller decision with the editorial suggestion that the Second Amendment be repealed. Shortly thereafter, the Trib’s editorial board apparently got smacked with the clue bat and publicly suggested that it would be unwise for the mayor to whiz away millions of taxpayers dollars fighting an unbeatable reality.
Chicago, like DC, banned handgun possession long ago within the city limits. There isn’t even a firearms retailer in the city proper, though a ring of fine gun shops surrounds Chicago in the suburbs. The satellite community of Morton Grove became notorious as the first municipality to ban handgun possession. It was followed by Wilmette, Winnetka, Oak Park, and Evanston.
Morton Grove has given up and surrendered the ordnance. Ditto, I’m told, Wilmette. Didn’t want to explain to the voters why they urinated away millions of dollars fighting the law. I’m reasonably well connected in Chicagoland for someone who doesn’t live there, and my sources tell me that while Oak Park wants to fight, Winnetka will probably cave. Evanston has reportedly been asked by the Brady Center to wait to throw in the towel until they’ve looked at the anti-gunners’ “alternate” legal proposal that they’re feverishly drawing up now.
It’s good to have the enemies of our rights on the defensive for a change. Morton Grove is where they used to manufacture those hideously kitschy plastic pink flamingoes. A few years ago, SWAT Magazine did a hilarious spoof on “Hunting the Morton Grove Pink Flamingo.” If I can lure one of those plastic pink posers onto my range, maybe I can shoot it with one of my Colt .45 auto pistols, in tribute to Dick Heller and the SCOTUS approved demise of a pathetic exercise in politically correct stupidity.
