Laurence Vance on McDonald v. Chicago

Gun Liberty and McDonald

Mayor Daley responds

NYT: Chicago Mayor Offers Strict Gun Rules

CHICAGO (AP) -- With the city's gun ban certain to be overturned, Mayor Richard Daley on Thursday introduced what city officials say is the strictest handgun ordinance in the United States.

The measure, which draws from ordinances around the country, would ban gun shops in Chicago and prohibit gun owners from stepping outside their homes, even onto their porches or garages, with a handgun.

Daley announced his ordinance at a park on the city's South Side three days after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Americans have a right to own a gun for self-defense anywhere they live. The City Council is expected to vote on it Friday.

''As long as I'm mayor, we will never give up or give in to gun violence that continues to threaten every part of our nation, including Chicago,'' said Daley, who was flanked by activists, city officials and the parents of a teenager whose son was shot and killed on a city bus while shielding a friend.

The ordinance, which Daley urged the City Council to pass, also would :

-- Limit the number of handguns residents can register to one per month and prohibit residents from having more than one handgun in operating order at any given time.

-- Require residents in homes with children to keep them in lock boxes or equipped with trigger locks.

-- Require prospective gun owners to take a four-hour class and one-hour training at a gun range. They would have to leave the city for training because Chicago prohibits new gun ranges and limits the use of existing ranges to police officers. Those restrictions were similar to those in an ordinance passed in Washington, D.C., after the high court struck down its ban two years ago.

-- Prohibit people from owning a gun if they were convicted of a violent crime, domestic violence or two or more convictions for driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs. Residents convicted of a gun offense would have to register with the police department.

-- Calls for the police department to maintain a registry of every handgun owner in the city, with the names and addresses to be made available to police officers, firefighters and other emergency responders.

Those who already have handguns in the city -- which has been illegal since the city's ban was approved 28 years ago -- would have 90 days to register those weapons, according to the proposed ordinance.

Residents convicted of violating the city's ordinance can face a fine up to $5,000 and be locked up for as long as 90 days for a first offense and a fine of up to $10,000 and as long as six months behind bars for subsequent convictions.

The mayor's proposal is celebrated by at least one Catholic--I got the above link from the post by a contributor to Mirror of Justice, Michael Perry: God bless Chicago's (Catholic) Mayor Daley -- and to Hell with the NRA. (I don't know why he's still allowed to contribute to the blog, when he puts up stuff like this: "A Dictatorship of Relativism?"

Leslie Green, Professor of Philosophy of Law, Balliol College, Oxford University, takes on Benedict XVI, here.

Is the Holy Father, like many, prone to using abstractions and genealogy in his analysis of sin? Might his analysis be incorrect as a result? Sure. But do we need a liberal like Leslie Green to tell us that the Holy Father is incorrect?

Sadly, to my way of thinking, since there’s so much that’s rich and important in Catholic moral theology, the Church has transformed itself into a kind of fertility cult, so that what it really cares about now is making sure that you know men aren’t having sex with men and nobody’s having abortions and there are no condoms in the JCR around the corner here and that there aren’t any divorces. Well even in a fairly liberal, tolerant sexual morality, there’s nobody that argues that anything goes. The people that Pope Benedict deplores don’t think that rape is okay, and they certainly don’t think that the sexual abuse of children is okay. Everybody agrees there is a bottom line minimum to which we all must conform. And the thing is of course that some folks disagree about where the minimums should be drawn. That’s democracy.

"More social justice talk! Less sex talk!"

There wouldn't be so much teaching concerning sexual morality if people were doing what was right.

Dr. Fleming invites us to a discussion of McDonald v. Chicago: The Supremes and the NRA.

Edit. 2nd Amendment Victory? An Opposing View

Dr. Fleming on natural law and McDonald v. Chicago

He responds to a comment left on his latest abortion post. First, natural law:

Before thinking about a political tactic, one has to frame an overall strategy, and before framing a strategy, one has to settle on the objective(s). So it hardly makes a difference what the accidental effects of Roe v. Wade are. If the objective is, regardless of any other principle or law or constitutional principle, to eliminate abortion, then returning the decision to the states might seem like a bad idea. However, eliminating abortion is an absolute impossibility, so in the name of an impossible objective we are scarcely justified in overturning an otherwise sound constitutional system that left homicide law up to the states.

Then there are questions of fact, having to do with diversity of abortion law. In the first place, it is not at all clear that all pregnant women would have the resources or the inclination to leave the state for an abortion. There is no useful parallel with fugitive slaves for several reasons: 1) slavery is a normal human institution and it is morally wrong to set up any equation of slavery=homicide, 2) slaves were property and it seems not unjust and not unconstitutional to insist upon the return of property from one state to another, 3) so what if there were a problem? Would that be worse than the current situation that permits a group of anti-constitutional jackasses on the court to dictate laws to states in which a majority oppose abortion? In fact, the price of our own liberties is to permit the wicked to lead their lives the way they wish to in their own communities.

Now, the question of higher law. The early Greeks did not have a concept of a universal moral law that could be rationally understood. I do agree with those scholars who have argued that Greek religion–especially the ideas that crystallized around the figure of Zeus–has an ethical component. The gods forbid certain activities, like mistreating a guest or seducing a man’s wife or stealing his property, but since these prohibitions are enacted into specific legal codes and traditions, there is no need to appeal to them. In general, it is not up to a judge or councillor to have ideas of his own or to appeal to an authority beyond the traditions that have given him his office.

Now, suppose there is a conflict between what everyone knows to be a divinely commanded rule and the decisions of a legal government? That is the situation in Sophocles’ Antigone, but, let us remember, that Creon has on his own account, thus acting as a tyrant, invented a new rule: the bodies of traitors are not to be buried. Antigone is acting not simply out of love for her brother–though that is her first motive–or even love plus respect for the gods–though she invokes that principle as well. but she is also doing what everyone in the community thinks his right. She does appeal to the higher law embedded in her people’s traditions, while Creon appeals to the higher law of all tyrants, raison d’etat.

Philosophers–Aristotle followed by the Stoics–did establish the principle of natural law, which Cicero introduced into Roman political and legal thought. But one cannot ordinarily appeal from Roman law to the natural law. It is by observing the laws of the Romans, the Greeks, and other peoples that one can sketch out a ius gentium, a general law adhered to by all decent nations, e.g. prohibitions on theft, murder, adultery, and by applying philosophical reasoning to the ius gentium, one may develop an understanding of a natural law that can be invoked when one is considering the rightness or wrongness of a tradition or a legal innovation, but no mere judge or even praetor may from his own mind use an abstract principle to overturn a longstanding tradition.

Our problem in understanding this lies, I think, in our habit of viewing the state as an institution of entrenched power controlled by leaders who are separate from the people. In the ancient world, such a perspective applied to tyrannies and not to legitimate governments

Then, yesterday's SCOTUS decision:

Here is a dilemma somewhat parallel to the question you raise. Suppose you are a Supreme Court justice who actually understands the Constitution–not a claim I would make for even the best of them, by the way. How do you vote on Chicago’s handgun ban? Obviously, the 2nd Amendment was not intended to apply to the states or municipalities in any way, but now that by the miracle of incorporation, the Bill of Rights means the opposite of what it actually says, do you uphold the ancient position and allow the Chicago crooks to deprive citizens of their guns or do you bow to necessity? My own view is that such a justice should take the opportunity to restate the original intent of the Bill of Rights then, bound by stare decisis, declare–as they did–that whatever is sauce for the First Amendment is sauce for the Second.

Peter Hitchens, Is Football A Pagan Cult?

I care about quite a few things, rather a lot, as readers of this site will know. Is it just an individual thing that I find the whole thing laughable, and actually quite want the English football team to lose, if only to bring home to these fanatics that this country is in fact in decline, and that its decay cannot be stopped by winning a football game - and that our inability to win tournaments in games we invented is a sign of that decline?

I am almost permanently furious that they can rush on to the streets to show 'patriotism' over a football game, but appear unmoved by the theft of our national independence, the rape of our countryside, the destruction of our culture and all the many real and lasting ways in which this country daily loses the Real World Cup of Nationhood.

Is it because I am one of the last living survivors of the public school era of compulsory sport and of semi-compulsory enthusiasm for it ('Stop slacking, get out there on the touchline and support your house, Hitchens!')

Perhaps it is, but if so, am I really worse than they are. I have marched in huge demonstrations and dissolved myself in crowds, and increasingly I regret having done so. I now prefer not to surrender to mass feelings, which are almost always wrong. More importantly, why do they care?

I do think a lot of people get pleasure from feeling they belong to something bigger than themselves. I also think there is a special satisfaction to be got from rituals, from unified chanting, and from the emotions of crowds.

The huge football stadiums of the 21st century are the pagan temples of today, in which we can take part in ceremonies of hero-worship, sing what pass for hymns, feel as one with our fellow-creatures and, if the thing is properly conducted, walk away afterwards with a feeling that life has been enhanced in some mysterious way.

People even wear special clothing for these occasions, the extraordinarily strange habit of dressing up in footballers' kit, with the name and number of a favourite player displayed on the torso.

I am told (but would like to know more) that the atmosphere and the pattern of major football matches is quite similar to those which would have been found at the great festivals of sacrifice which were held before enormous crowds in the temples of Ancient Greece and Rome.

If our civilisation were to be overcome by a volcanic disaster,as was Pompeii (which Heaven forfend), what would the archaeologists of 4010 make of football, if they had nothing to go on apart from the perfectly-preserved remains of the fans?

I think they would conclude that it had a religious purpose.