Federal Judge Shoots Down Chicago's Latest 2A Delaying Tactic in Court

From the Second Amendment Foundation:

A federal court judge in Illinois has denied a City of Chicago motion for summary judgment and refused to dismiss a case challenging a ban of firearms sales within city limits that is backed by the Second Amendment Foundation.

It is the latest in a string of court battles between Chicago and SAF, causing SAF founder and Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb to observe, “We’ve already beat Chicago three times, in the McDonald case before the Supreme Court, and both Ezell 1 and Ezell 2 before the federal court of appeals. I’m reminded of the folk song by Peter, Paul and Mary that asked, ‘When will they ever learn’?”

The case involves a proposed gun shop called Second Amendment Arms (SAA), owned by R. Joseph Franzese, who submitted an application for a business license in July 2010. The city contends that the application was for an address in an area not zoned for commercial use, but Franzese argues that he was not advised about the zoning and that it had been advertised as commercial property. Besides, he contended that the city’s prohibition on gun sales “would have blocked (their) efforts no matter where (they) chose.”

“The City of Chicago under Rahm Emanuel is trying to be too clever by half,” Gottlieb said. “We would have thought by now that they would have ceased this pattern of spending tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars on stubborn litigation, but the city seems determined to be dragged kicking and screaming into compliance with the Second Amendment.

U.S. District Court Judge Robert M. Dow, Jr., set Sept. 28 as the next date to discuss damages for the plaintiff in this case, which is known as Second Amendment Arms v. City of Chicago.

“Since losing its gun ban fight in the Supreme Court’s 2010 McDonald ruling,” Gottlieb noted, “Chicago has been digging its heels in deeper and deeper, throwing every kind of legal roadblock it could in an effort to delay what seems inevitable. The city has got to follow the law and the constitution, and as long as they keep fighting, we’ll keep suing.

“That’s what winning firearms freedom one lawsuit at a time is all about,” he concluded. 

 Chicago seems as determined as the District of Columbia to fight any exercise of Second Amendment rights for as long as they possibly can. Perhaps, at some point, the courts will tire of the endless, pointless games being played by the bankrupt city. Chicago is willing to spend millions of dollars it does not have to fight court cases it is highly unlikely to win.  All in the name of the ideological purity of preventing people from defending themselves.

It seems a losing game. But to the politicians who make these decisions, it is only spending other people’s money. It may bring in contributions to political campaigns from big money Democrat donors, such as Michael Bloomberg.

Spend other people’s money with a high probability of being rewarded with money in your own accounts…. Maybe those politicians are not so dumb after all.

©2017 by Dean Weingarten: Permission to share is granted when this notice and link are included.

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