Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

Chicago’s Mayor Daley, a fine and shining example of political corruption if there ever was one, isn’t taking the recent Supreme Court ruling regarding his city’s handgun ban lightly. In what can only be described as a world-class example of sour grapes, the mayor has determined that city residents may own a handgun. A handgun. But you gotta license it..and register it..and take a class…and some range time (but outside Chicago since gun ranges aren’t allowed there for mere civilians)..and you cant take it out of your house..and you can only have one functioning handgun per person per household. There were further restrictions that he wanted but they were discarded because even his own people said that there was no way theyd stand up in court.

So what does this mean to you and I? Well, its an example of how even if something is perfectly legal there are ways to make it virtually illegal. My own lifestyle would violate every line of the Chicago ordinance. I own more than one, took no classes, take one or two out of the house daily, and no way are they registered with the locals. And that’s just the handguns…the rifle collection would positively push them over the edge.

While it may be, on paper, legal for you to own a gun the government can make it so onerous and burdensome as to make it virtually impossible. As time goes by, Im sure that the Daley cabal will polish up their knives and make ‘improvements’, ‘modifications’ or ‘sensible changes’…prohibitively high fees, ammunition restrictions, magazine capacity limits, etc, etc, etc. You’ll see.

You may have a constitutional right to own a gun, as the courts have agreed, but theres nothing to keep that right from being fraught with restrictions. And, mind you, these restrictions can be slapped on at any point. One day you wake up and your local municipality has decided you only ‘need’ one gun, it needs to be licensed, registered, and ballistically fingerprinted, and those ‘extra’ guns you have need to be turned in, sold or taken out of the city limits immediately. To one extent or another this has happened already in places like New York and California.

When situations like this occur, the choice is pretty simple and straightforward – obey the law or don’t obey the law. It may not be much of a choice, but if you have your guns already then at least you have that choice. If you wait until after nonsensical legislation like this is passed before getting your guns then you really don’t have much of a choice at all..

Mayor Daley, living proof that corruption and malice may in fact be hereditary traits passed from one generation of weasel to the next, no doubt feels that his restrictions will somehow keep Chicago safe. Here in the great state of Montana there are more guns than people, yet we have a gun crime rate that is rather low. Perhaps the problem isn’t guns but rather people? Of course, espousing that possibility may not be politically correct but………

Here’s the lesson to take away from this: you’ve just seen how even when something is guaranteed to you by one part of government (gun ownership guaranteed by the feds) it can be nailed to the floor by another branch of government (Chicago local government machine) making it virtually worthless. Plan accordingly. Have these things before the time comes where you may be prohibited from having them (or having more of them).

Or, I suppose, move out of Chicago.