Chicago mayor's new executive order targets gun dealers instead of criminals

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What we know

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⚖ The Constitutional Angle

Heller recognized an individual Second Amendment right but preserved longstanding regulations, including conditions on commercial sale of firearms. McDonald applied that right to states and cities through the Fourteenth Amendment, reversing a Chicago gun law. A city order targeting dealers touches a category Heller itself flagged as presumptively regulable, though specific burdens still face the governing history-and-tradition test.

District of Columbia v. Heller 554 U.S. 570 (2008)

Vote: 5-4 · Opinion: Scalia

The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia and to use it for traditionally lawful purposes such as self-defense within the home. The right is not unlimited: the Court noted that longstanding prohibitions (e.g., possession by felons and the mentally ill, carrying in sensitive places, conditions on commercial sale) remain presumptively lawful. D.C.'s ban on handgun possession in the home and its requirement that lawful firearms in the home be kept nonfunctional violate the Second Amendment.

McDonald v. City of Chicago, Illinois 561 U.S. 742 (2010)

Vote: 5-4 · Opinion: Alito

The Second Amendment right recognized in Heller is fully applicable to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment. A four-Justice plurality incorporated the right via the Due Process Clause as fundamental to the Nation's scheme of ordered liberty and deeply rooted in its history and tradition; Justice Thomas supplied the fifth vote via the Privileges or Immunities Clause. The Seventh Circuit's judgment upholding Chicago's and Oak Park's handgun bans was reversed and remanded.

Precedent facts from the PW Law Library — primary-source verified & independently audited