But Armageddon never happened. Newly released data for Chicago shows that, as in D.C., murder and gun crime rates didn’t rise after the bans were eliminated; they plummeted. They have fallen much more than the national crime rate, but the national media has been completely silent. One can only imagine the coverage if crime rates had risen.

In the first six months of this year, there were 14% fewer murders in Chicago compared to the first six months of last year– back when owning handguns was illegal. It was the largest drop in Chicago’s murder rate since the handgun ban went into effect in 1982. Meanwhile, the other four most populous cities saw a total drop at the same time of only 6 percent.

Similarly, in the year after the 2008 Heller decision, the murder rate fell 2.5 times faster in D.C. than in the rest of the country. It also fell more than three times as fast as in other cities that are close to D.C.’s size.

And murders in D.C. have continued to fall. If you compare the first six months of this year to the first six months of 2008, the same time immediately preceding the Supreme Court’s late June Heller decision, murders have now fallen by 34%.

Gun crimes fell more than non-gun crimes. Robberies with guns fell by 25%, while robberies without guns have fallen by 8%. Assaults with guns fell by 37%, while assaults without guns fell by 12%. Just as with right-to-carry laws, when law-abiding citizens have guns, some criminals stop carrying theirs.

Read the full article at Fox News.

Illinois State Sen. Ricky Hendon appeared on the Don and Roma Show on Chicago’s WLS radio to discuss his candidacy for Mayor of Chicago.

It is expected that White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel will resign his position with the Obama Administration to announce his candidacy this week.  Hendon bristled at the prospect of Chicago’s favorite son, Barack Obama, endorcing his long-time ally Emanuel.  He outlined the issue for the WLS audience in stark, racial terms.

While Emanuel is expected to announce his departure as White House Chief of Staff this week, Hendon says it would be a detrimental mistake for President Barack Obama to endorse him as mayor.

From WLS:

“If Barack never wanted to be president again, let him go right ahead. But I guarantee you if he endorses Rahm or [Tom] Dart, uh, he’ll never be president again,” Hendon said.

Hendon said that Obama would be alienating even more of his already dwindling base which included 90 percent of the nation’s African-American vote in the 2008 election.

“Why would you want to do something to make them worse? Why would you want to alienate people who worked for him in various states just as hard as Rahm did. I’m not putting Rahm down. He did a lot. But I guarantee he didn’t knock on as many doors as I knocked on, or Emil Jones or Danny K. Davis,” Hendon said.

But this Daley has decided to bow out, for some real reason we’ll find out later. That means Chicago will be getting a new mayor soon. And that new mayor just may be…Rahm Emanuel?

Obama’s Chief of Staff is a Chicago boy. He was a Clinton White House senior adviser, a Chicago-area Congressman, and head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee before his current gig. By the way, he’s just not that into his current gig. He was into it when they were riding high, but now that Obama’s sucking salt, he’s dying to get outta there.

So, he’s going to run for mayor of Chicagoland. And he’ll win, because Chicago is Chicago. Beautiful city, ridiculously stupid politics. In Chicago, if you’re not indicted, you’re not invited.

One thing’s for sure: if Rahm runs for mayor, he will be leaving a gaping hole in the Obama White House. Yes, he’s profane and brutal and a huge jerk. But he’s also the only guy in this White House who is a true political animal and not a pure ideologue. Obama, David Axelrod, and Valerie Jarrett—the three remaining in the Bama Inner Circle—are complete, true-believing Saul Alinsky devotees. For them, the top-to-bottom remaking of America as a wealth-redistributing, socialist state trumps everything, including politics, polls, and even re-election. Rahm is a dedicated Democrat, but he’s not stupid. He tried to throw the brakes on Obamacare and Obama’s misguided Ground Zero mosque comments, as well as other off-the-wall Obama policies. He’s the only character in this White House that could possibly save it from itself.

But he wants out big time. The rats are bailing on the sinking ship: first key economic advisers Christina Romer and Peter Orszag said sayonara. Now Rahm is about to wave goodbye. There will be others after the November election.

This White House will miss Rahm. For all his faults—and they are legion—he was, God help us, the only voice of reason in there.

Soon, he’ll be Mayor Rahm. Hey Chicago: you’ve got that to look forward to.

Chicago Mayor Richard Daley says he’s not running for re-election after decades in office.

Daley said Tuesday he’s been thinking about not running for several months and has become comfortable with his decision over the last several weeks. Daley says “it just feels right.” Daley says the time to move on “is now.”

The 68-year-old Democrat has been Chicago’s mayor since 1989.

The decision threw out the Seventh Circuit ruling upholding Chicago’s gun ban and ordered the Seventh to revisit its decision. This new ruling does not specifically strike down Chicago’s gun ban but the opinion leaves little room for the Seventh to up hold Mayor Richard Daley’s gun banning efforts.

One of the main questions before the Court was whether or not the 14th Amendment served to shore up the rights in the 2nd. The Court found that it did, indeed. In fact, it is interesting to note that the ancestors of the very people that the 14th Amendment was meant to specifically protect — newly freed slaves, called freemen — are today those that Mayor Richard Daley and others like him want to disarm. Daley and his ilk want to disempower blacks and other minorities and tie them plantation-like to their government authority.

In the majority opinion in the McDonald decision specifically notes the history of the 14th Amendment and its preceding basis for being the protector of the freemen.

After the Civil War, many of the over 180,000 African Americans who served in the Union Army returned to the States of the old Confederacy, where systematic efforts were made to disarm them and other blacks. The laws of some States formally prohibited African Americans from possessing firearms. For example, a Mississippi law provided that “no freed- man, free negro or mulatto, not in the military service of the United States government, and not licensed so to do by the board of police of his or her county, shall keep or carry fire-arms of any kind, or any ammunition, dirk or bowie knife.” (pg 23)

There was but one reason why freedmen were prohibited from having firearms and that was so that they would be unable to defend themselves against terrorists like the Klan or be able to enjoy the fruits of citizenship. Scalia notes that the Freedman’s Bureau began to add rules to its repertoire to specifically affirm the newly freed black’s right to self defense (pg 27).

Going on with the history of the post war freemen, the opinion of the court notes that during the debates for the 14th Amendment their rights to self-protection were considered sacrosanct. During debate, Senator Samuel Pomeroy (R, Kansas) described three “indispensable” “safeguards of liberty under our form of Government.” (pg 28)

“Every man… should have the right to bear arms for the defense of himself and family and his home- stead. And if the cabin door of the freedman is broken open and the intruder enters for purposes as vile as were known to slavery, then should a well-loaded musket be in the hand of the occupant to send the pol- luted wretch to another world, where his wretched- ness will forever remain complete.”

It is an outrage though that nearly 150 years after the great Civil War began to end the oppression of blacks in America mayors like Chicago’s Daley and Mike Bloomberg of New York want to take away the hard fought rights for which blacks in America suffered so long.

Another outrage is that four Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States have fallen to such tortured logic to excuse away their unconstitutional, modern stance quite despite all the rich, detailed history that has for so long affirmed the obvious truth that we as Americans have the right to self protection.

In fact, Scalia notes how illogical and ungrounded Justice Stevens’ dissenting opinion is. In essence, Stevens claims that as a judge he can declare the 2nd Amendment null and void just because he says so. There is no logical or historical basis for Stevens’ feeling that the 2nd Amendment is not an individual right but nonetheless Stevens thinks he sees a “sensitivity to the interaction between the intrinsic aspects of liberty and the practical realities of contemporary society” deep in the mists of a judge’s soul.

The absurdity of this is immediately evident, but Scalia lambastes the foolishness of this mystic claim in his concurring opinion.

He describes as “an important tool for guiding judicial discretion” “sensitivity to the interaction between the intrinsic aspects of liberty and the practical realities of contemporary society.” I cannot say whether that sensitivity will really guide judges because I have no idea what it is. Is it some sixth sense instilled in judges when they ascend to the bench? Or does it mean judges are more constrained when they agonize about the cosmic conflict between liberty and its potentially harmful consequences?

Justice Thomas similarly destroys the lack of logic of the left calling it a “legal fiction.”

The notion that a constitutional provision that guarantees only “process” before a person is deprived of life, liberty, or property could define the substance of those rights strains credulity for even the most casual user of words. Moreover, this fiction is a particularly dangerous one. The one theme that links the Court’s substantive due process precedents together is their lack of a guiding principle to distinguish “fundamental” rights that warrant protection from nonfundamental rights that do not. Today’s decision illustrates the point. Replaying a debate that has endured from the inception of the Court’s substantive due process jurisprudence, the dissents laud the “flexibility” in this Court’s substantive due process doctrine, while the plurality makes yet another effort to impose principled restraints on its exercise. But neither side argues that the meaning they attribute to the Due Process Clause was consistent with public understanding at the time of its ratification.

These are biting commentary, for sure. But it does go to show the untenable, illogical, capricious basis upon which liberals base their thinking, not just in this case but in all their judicial and policy prescriptions. The McDonald case reveals the left’s lack of concern for the meaning of the law and also alarms for the fact that just one more unapologetically, anti-constitutional liberal on the court would tip us from a rule of law to the rule of elites and their situational ethics-based, ever shifting ideas.

Since the Mayor’s getting very little done in Springfield or Washington or in the courts to expand gun control, now he wants mayors in other countries like Mexico to drag American gunmakers into the World Court in the Hague.

Daley says, “We are shipping guns there by the truckload to people to kill each other. They’re not manufactured there. And we want the drugs that come from other countries that is a conduit, like a highway through Mexico, into the United States! And we sit like we have no responsibility. We should not ship any guns to Mexico.”

I asked the Mayor what legal authority there is to sue the U.S. gun industry in the World Court. He said, “Well, that’s why we have about 12 million lawyers. You never know until you try.”

Continue reading here.