The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
News You Can Use
“Stop Confusing Bashar al-Assad With Saddam Hussein”–headline, NationalJournal.com, Sept. 4
That’s Easy for You to Say
“How a Bible Translation Is Preserving the Pitjantjatjara Language”–headline, Australian, Sept. 7
How Much for a Safe-Deposit Box?
“New York City Rents Vault Over $3,000 a Month”–headline, The Wall Street Journal, July 9
Question and Answer
- “How Do You Know When President Obama Is Lying? MSNBC Won’t Tell You”–headline, Huffington Post, July 7
- “Obama Claims Broccoli Is His Favorite Food”–headline, Reuters, July 9
Carry Forward
“This is a historic, significant day for law-abiding gun owners,” the Associated Press [on July 9] quotes Rep. Brandon Phelps as saying. “They finally get to exercise their Second Amendment rights.”
Phelps, a Democrat, hails from Harrisburg, Ill., a small city more than five hours south of Chicago by road. In a decade in the state House, the AP notes, he “has continued work on concealed carry begun by his uncle, ex-Rep. David Phelps, who began serving in the mid-1980s.” Yesterday that work came to fruition as lawmakers in Springfield overrode Gov. Pat Quinn’s “amendatory veto” of a bill establishing a permitting system for the carrying of concealed firearms.
“Quinn had predicted a ‘showdown in Springfield,’ …but “lawmakers had little appetite for fiddling any further with the legislation on the deadline day.” That deadline, as we noted in December, was established by a three-judge panel of the Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which held that Illinois’s blanket ban on carrying firearms in public–the only remaining state law of its kind–was unconstitutional. The court stayed its ruling for 180 days to give the Illinois General Assembly time to enact remedial legislation, which it did yesterday as the clock ran out.
Don’t rush out to the gun store yet, though. “It will likely be 2014 before any firearm owners are permitted to pack handguns in public,” reports the Chicago Tribune. That’s because “Illinois now has to set about building a bureaucracy to process applications.”
The Trib adds: “While gun owners may have questions about how soon they’ll be able to carry guns in public, other state residents may also have questions about where they can expect to find people armed with deadly weapons.”
That’s an easy one to answer: You can expect to find people armed with deadly weapons in just about any dodgy Chicago neighborhood. As the AP reports:
Some lawmakers feared failure to pass something [and thereby triggering the Seventh Circuit’s injunction] would mean virtually unregulated weapons in Chicago, which has endured severe gun violence in recent months–including more than 70 shootings, at least 12 of them fatal, during the Independence Day weekend.
Wait, how could Chicago have all those shootings when it’s illegal to carry a gun? Don’t street criminals have any respect for the law? Oh wait, of course they don’t–which is why Chicago already had “virtually unregulated weapons.” The new law will allow honest citizens, those who do comply with regulations, to defend themselves.
[Note: Most of the excerpts above are from the July 10 BOTW Archives.] For more “Best of the Web” click here and look for the “Best of the Web Today” link in the middle column below “Today’s Columnists.
