Mayor Richard Daley holds his hand in the form of a gun during a press conference at City Hall on the Supreme Court
“Something has to be done, Mr. President, about the sale of guns.”
Forty-four years after race riots prompted Mayor Richard J. Daley to make that vain plea to President Lyndon B. Johnson, Mr. Daley’s son, Mayor Richard M. Daley, spent much of the past week reacting furiously to the latest setback in his fight for gun control.
A Supreme Court ruling on Monday effectively ended Chicago’s 28-year-old handgun ban despite Mr. Daley’s argument that the prohibition was needed primarily to protect police officers and paramedics. It was soon clear that any replacement ordinance would have to fall short of an outright ban to keep from violating the second Amendment’s right to bear arms.
Indeed, on Friday the City Council met in a hastily summoned session to approve Mayor Daley’s new “Responsible Gun Ownership” ordinance, allowing handgun owners to be able to register one weapon per month after undergoing classroom and firing range training.
Though Mr. Daley complained that the court’s 5 to 4 decision rendered the ban “unenforceable,” the head of the police union said it was rarely enforced anyway.
“It apparently didn’t have much of an impact, judging from the number of shootings and the number of guns seized on an annual basis,” said Mark Donahue, president of the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7, which represents officers below the rank of sergeant.
Both Mara Georges, the Daley administration’s top lawyer, and Jody Weis, the police superintendant, said they did not know how often anyone had been charged and convicted of violating the handgun ban.
The number of guns seized by police has stayed consistently high in recent years, according to department statistics. Not counting guns acquired by authorities through weapon turn-in programs, 7,326 guns were confiscated in 2008 and 8,259 last year, more than any other United States city, according to the Chicago Police Department. With 4,139 guns seized from Jan. 1 to June 28, this year is on course to top the 2009 total.
Phil Cline, a former Chicago police superintendant, said the biggest decrease in the number of guns on the street came in the mid-1990s, after the passage of the state’s “Safe Neighborhoods Act,” which made it a felony to carry a gun in public. Before 1995, the crime had been a misdemeanor. Mr. Cline said the numbers plummeted by roughly 50 percent at that time. But Chicago Police officials did not respond to a request for statistics.
“That was one piece of legislation that really had an impact on the streets,” Mr. Cline said last week, adding that the best course of action now is to pass state laws that require tougher mandatory penalties for gun violations.
Mr. Daley took offense at the Supreme Court’s suggestion in its ruling that local leaders may not be doing all they can to stem gun violence.
Alderman Robert Fioretti (2nd Ward) said, however, that he did not think the justices’ point was without merit. “If we don’t have the full compliment of police on the street, we’re not doing everything possible,” Mr. Fioretti said.
The city’s budget problems have torpedoed the mayor’s promises to put more officers on the street. In this year’s budget, there were 13,200 positions for officers, a decrease of 300. The actual size of the force is about 12,500, or 680 fewer than two years ago, said Mr. Donohue, the police union leader.
“On a day-to-day basis, a 5 percent drop is very significant,” he said. “A lot of officers have been redeployed to special units, leaving the rank-and-file officers to run from call to call instead of doing any proactive police work.”
Although the mayor and his aides described the measure that was passed on Friday as the strongest of its kind in the nation, what was ratified was far less stringent than what the administration had suggested it would push for as recently as Wednesday.
The day after learning that the city could no longer entirely ban handguns, Ms. Georges told the aldermen that the mayor wanted to cap handgun ownership at one firearm per home. By Thursday, city officials said they would set a limit of one gun purchase per adult per month.
“We simply changed our minds,” said Jennifer Hoyle, a spokeswoman for the Law Department.
Mr. Daley also backed down from his initial suggestion that the city require gun owners to purchase liability insurance, fearing that such an action and the one-gun-per-home restriction would leave the city vulnerable to legal challenges.
The new regulations were approved quickly with little public notice.
Top mayoral aides rushed from a park district field house on the South Side — where Mr. Daley announced his plan at 9 a.m. Thursday — to attend a meeting of the City Council’s Police and Fire Committee. The panel quickly gave the revised measure preliminary approval at the meeting, which had been announced less than two hours before it began. The full council voted 45-0 in favor on Friday.
Despite the revisions that made the regulations less onerous for gun buyers, the final version still creates several hurdles to gun ownership in the city.
Anyone who wants to keep a gun in his or her home will have to undergo training in a classroom and at a firing range. Because the new measure bans gun shops from operating in the city, prospective gun owners will have to go out of town to get trained.
Firing ranges in the suburbs anticipate a boom in business. “Obviously, it’s going to be good for us,” said Noel Incavo, co-owner of Midwest Guns & Pistol Range in Lyons. He estimated that the cost of training in his shooting range would be about $100.
Guns will be allowed only inside homes — not on porches, not in backyards and not in autos, city officials said.
Daniel W. Webster, co-director of the Center for Gun Policy and Research at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, met with city officials last week to discuss the new ordinance. He praised the provision that bans gun ownership by anyone convicted of a violent crime, domestic violence or two or more offenses for driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol.
“Certainly, there was a lot of gun violence even with the ban, but it could have been worse were handguns readily available,” Mr. Webster said. “It’s very difficult to know.”
At a news conference at City Hall on Wednesday, the mayor shrugged off questions about how effective the ban had been. Just saving one life would be worth the trouble if it saved your son, he said.
The mayor had followed the same impulse as his father, and has tried to limit gun sales. Whether those actions can withstand legal challenges and make Chicago safer is not yet known.
The mayor — a lawyer who often decries the litigious nature of Americans — said he did not fear the inevitable legal battles over the new regulations.
“Everybody has the right to sue,” he said. “I wish I could craft something perfect. Nothing is perfect in life.”
Complement, not compliment.