Chicago prepares for new concealed carry gun law
29 June yahoo.com
This city, where violent street gangs shoot it out dozens of times a
week despite some of the nation's toughest restrictions on guns, now
faces a new challenge: Well-meaning citizens with the legal right to hit
the streets with loaded firearms, whenever they want.
As Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn mulls whether to sign off on eliminating
the
country's last concealed carry ban, the question in Chicago is
whether it will matter in the crime-weary city. Will a place that long
had one of the tightest bans on handguns be more at risk? Or will it be
safer with a law that can only add to the number of guns already on the
street? Neighborhood leaders, anti-crime activists and police officials
worry about additional mayhem in Chicago. But other residents, including
some who live in Chicago's more violent areas, believe more guns will
allow them to defend themselves better.
“We just had a weekend where something like 48 people were shot,
seven
died,” said Otis McDonald, 79, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit
that ended with the U.S. Supreme Court tossing out Chicago's strict gun
ban three years ago. “Now law abiding citizens like myself ... can carry
them when they want to and not carry them when they don't want to, and
the people out there who will do us harm won't know when we got them and
when we don't.”
At City Hall, where Chicago's anti-gun campaign has centered for
years, the reaction to concealed carry legislation has been relatively
quiet. The reasons seem to boil down to this: The city can do little
about stopping the law because a federal appeals court ordered Illinois
to end its public possession ban by this summer.
“We would prefer to have the (gun) bans we've always enacted... (but)
it's
the best we could do based upon the mandate we have,” said Alderman
Patrick O'Connor. The bill sitting on Quinn's desk is a hard-fought
compromise between conservative downstate lawmakers who opposed most gun
restrictions and anti-gun lawmakers from Chicago and other urban areas. |