Monday, July 21, 2008

Another gun ban bites the dust

According to this report, the aldermen of Evanston, Illinois have voted to repeal that town's handgun ban in the wake of the Supreme Court's Heller ruling:
Evanston aldermen unanimously voted to amend the city's 27-year-old handgun ban last week at a special closed-door meeting in light of a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision that struck down a similar ban in the District of Columbia.
...
"No one was particularly happy or anxious to do anything that would change the ordinance," Ald. Edmund Moran (6th) said. "But we're being confronted with this lawsuit and rather than engaging in a protracted fight and spending a lot of money, it would be a better course of action to revise our ordinance in a way that it would make it more legally sustainable."
...
"We are conforming to the court's ruling," he said. "But we are also going to closely examine those statements in particular and try to fashion our amendments accordingly."

Evanston Police Department Chief Richard Eddington said law enforcement officials are waiting to see how drastically the weapons ordinance will change. Under the existing ordinance, police issued 16 handgun ordinance violations and reported 107 incidents involving handguns, according to the Evanston Police Department's 2006 Annual Report. Now with the recent handgun ban amendments, there are concerns over whether a possible increase in the number of weapons might jeopardize community safety.
...
Mayor Lorraine Morton, the defendant in the NRA lawsuit, attended the meeting and is concerned that the recent court ruling disregards important issues about the safety of the community.

"I just can't see how anyone could be helped by the gun ruling that the U.S. Supreme Court put out," Mayor Lorraine Morton said. "But you can't fight the Supreme Court." [emphasis added]
Don't you love to hear the anti-gunners whine? :)

More seriously, if Washington, D.C. is any guide, the anti-gun politicians will try to make the process of lawfully owning a handgun in Evanston as difficult as possible.

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