Richard Daley is an asshole

His name is Richard Daley, mayor of the city of Chicago, Illinois.

Daley is a dunderhead, but he knows how the U.S. Constitution works: it was written by the framers and is interpreted by the courts, the highest of which is the U.S. Supreme Court. He knows that if the Supreme Court says the Constitution guarantees a particular right to citizens then it becomes the law of the land and applies to all jurisdictions. Including his own. The Supreme Court ruled in July that the Second Amendment of the Constitution guarantees the individual right of citizens to “keep and bear arms”. This ruling forced Washington D.C. and many other cities to change their laws, including cities in the state of Illinois: Morton Grove, Wilmette, Evanston, Winnetka.

But not Chicago! No, because its mayor, Richard Daley, is an imbecile who doesn’t apply laws he doesn’t like:

“Does this lead to everyone having a gun in our society?” he demanded after the ruling came down. “Then why don’t we do away with the court system and go back to the Old West, where you have a gun and I have a gun and we’ll settle it in the streets?”

As Steve Chapman points out:

From listening to him, you might assume that the only places in North America that don’t have firefights on a daily basis are cities that outlaw handguns. You might also assume that Chicago is an oasis of concord, rather than the site of 443 homicides last year.

And those two points tie together perfectly, because the evidence shows that the jurisdictions with the highest levels of violent crime, including gun crime, are those which have the most laws restricting firearms! It’s the obverse of John Lott’s book title, “[Allowing] More guns, [observing] less crime.’ Nobody who has studied these statistics is surprised to hear that Chicago’s murder rate is high, or to hear that assholes like Daley are in charge.

He doesn’t care what the Constitution says; that makes him arrogant. He doesn’t care what the evidence says either, that cities which allow handguns to be owned and even carried around have much lower rates of violent crime than his; that makes him an ignoramus. He is an arrogant ignoramus!

Daley refuses to observe the law, even at great cost to the city of Chicago as its residents now pay dearly to fight the lawsuits brought by some of their own number, lawsuits which they’ll inevitably lose. (As if they weren’t already paying, by virtue of their lack of being able to defend themselves effectively in their own homes, and the high rates of crime that fact encourages.) And as Chapman says:

Daley’s recalcitrance may be viscerally satisfying to him and some others, but it doesn’t change the choice the city faces. It can change the law now or it can change it later. Later will be a lot more expensive.