Chicago, Guns, and Pretending not to Have Lost
I was amused by a recent article quoting Mara Georges, a top attorney for the city of Chicago, on how the city could continue to achieve the objectives of the gun ban that the Supreme Court just declared to be unconstitutional. The policy which she proposed and claimed—for all I know correctly—was still constitutional, would be to limit handgun ownership to one handgun per resident and ban gun shops within the city. As she explained:
"Part of the goal is to prevent straw purchases, limit suicides and make it less likely one family member will hurt another, either accidentally or intentionally."
The point about straw purchases is a legitimate one. Committing suicide, or killing your spouse, only requires one gun.
“The same concerns that motivate a one handgun per person per residence limit — reducing the number of guns in circulation in Chicago and the risk of illegal traffic in guns — motivate the gun dealer ban,” she added. “Gun dealers have access to large quantities of guns. Gun stores therefore pose a serious risk of guns flowing quickly into the community and into the hands of criminals through theft or through illegal trafficking.”
She went on to say that there are 45 gun stores within 13 miles of the city.
'It is clear that Chicago residents who would like to own a gun for self defense in the home have a wide array of options very close to the city at which to purchase their handgun,' she said."
No explanation of what prevents criminals, like other people, from obtaining their firearms from suburban gun shops.
I am reminded, oddly enough, of a conversation with a Harvard economist a very long time ago.
In the early sixties, when I was an undergraduate at Harvard, it was taken for granted by most economists, in particular by Harvard economists, that there was a tradeoff between inflation and unemployment, permitting a government that wished to keep unemployment down to do so at the cost of letting prices rise; the relationship was referred to as the Phillips Curve. The rival Chicago school argued that the relation held only in the short run. Once people adjusted their expectations to the new inflation rate, unemployment would go back up. The Harvard view of Chicago was reflected in the comment of a fellow student that he couldn't take economics at Chicago because he would burst out laughing.
Professional opinion shifted a little later, due both to evidence—stagflation—and theory. At some point, probably in the seventies, I happened to be discussing the issue with someone from the Harvard economics department. He commented that everyone, of course, knew that the long run Phillips Curve was vertical—precisely the old Chicago position. But it was at least logically possible that the temporary gain from the reduced unemployment in the short term would be larger than the costs of the permanent increase in the inflation rate needed to produce it. Like Ms Georges, he was doing his best to salvage what he could from the wreckage of defeat—in his case intellectual rather than legal.