Chicago’s rising murder rate is now about three times the murder rate in New York City. Chicago has 75,000 gang members, more than six times its number of police officers. This adopted home of Barack Obama may have suffered from his politics, as he even opposed making it a crime in Illinois for convicts on probation or on bail to have contact with a street gang. Criminals, apparently, have little to fear from law enforcement or innocent victims.

In contrast, some New York City residents can obtain a handgun carry permit for self-defense, and a criminal cannot be sure who can defend against an attack. When a tough teenage gang famously menaced the meek-looking Bernard Goetz on a subway train in 1984, he surprised them by pulling out a gun and firing back. But since 1983, Chicago has absolutely banned handguns, giving thugs nothing to fear in assaulting vulnerable people.

Last June the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in D.C. v. Heller that an absolute ban on handguns in the District of Columbia is unconstitutional under the Second Amendment, which gives law-abiding citizens a right to keep and bear arms. The Supreme Court emphasized that one has a right to own a gun in his own residence for his protection.

Merely one day after this pro-gun ruling by the Supreme Court, the National Rifle Association (NRA) sued Chicago and the Village of Oak Park to overturn their absolute bans on handguns, citing the Supreme Court decision and the Second Amendment. These lawsuits seemed like a slam dunk in applying D.C. v. Heller to strike down the bans on guns by Chicago and Oak Park.

But the Northern District of Illinois found a way to uphold the handgun bans in spite of the Supreme Court ruling. NRA of Am., Inc. v. Vill. of Oak Park, 2008 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 98134 (N.D. Ill. Dec. 4, 2008). The Court’s opinion, merely 1200 words, held that the Second Amendment does not apply to State or local laws under a precedent set by the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. Nearly all of the liberties of the Bill of Rights have been applied to the States via the Due Process and Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, but the Court found an exception for the Second Amendment.

The Court found loose language in D.C. v. Heller suggesting that perhaps the Second Amendment is not incorporated against the States in the same way that the other Bill of Rights are. The Court then relied on old precedent by its own appellate court against incorporation of the Second Amendment against the States, and said it was duty bound to follow its superiors unless and until the Seventh Circuit overturned itself. The Court even poked fun at the NRA’s suggestion that a trial court should “overturn” a precedent of the (higher) Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals.

The Court ended with a quotation of the utilitarian and future Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: “The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience.” But the rejection of logic is not something to embrace. On appeal, perhaps the Seventh Circuit will restore logic to the Second Amendment.