Judge Rules Part of Chicago Gun Law Unconstitutional
By Chuck Sudo in News on Jun 19, 2012 9:30PM
Part of Chicago's Firearm Ordinance was ruled unconstitutional by a federal judge on Tuesday. Judge Samuel Der-Yeghiayan ruled that the section of the law banning permits for people convicted of "unlawful use of a weapon" doesn't adequately define what that means.
Der-Yeghiayan made his ruling while weighing on a lawsuit filed against the city by Shawn Gowder. Gowder, who holds a state firearm owner's identification card, was denied a Chicago firearm permit because he has a 1995 misdemeanor conviction for possessing a firearm on a public street. (Gowder's conviction was originally a felony, but was later downgraded to a misdemeanor.)
Gowder argued to the city's Department of Administrative Hearings that he wanted the permit because he lived in a high crime neighborhood and that denying him one was a violation of his Second and Fourteenth amendment rights.
In his ruling, Der-Yeghiyan wrote:
“There is something incongruent about a non-violent person, who is not a felon, but who is convicted of a misdemeanor offense of simple possession of a firearm, being forever barred from exercising his constitutional right to defend himself in his own home in Chicago against felons or violent criminals. The same Constitution that protects people’s right to bear arms prohibits this type of indiscriminate and arbitrary governmental regulation.”
The firearm ordinance, which requires gun owners to obtain a gun permit with the city and register their guns with police, was passed by City Council in 2010 four days after the Supreme Court overturned the city's handgun ban. The lynchpin of the ordinance is the registration requirement and, as the Reader's Mick Dumke wrote last June, some gun owners opted not to register their guns with the city and that even some cops viewed the ordinance as not being a deterrent on crime, given stiffer state and federal statutes on the books.