Illinois, seemingly the home of all things nutty these days, is getting attention from gun rights advocates because of a lawsuit filed recently by one of the state’s citizens who was denied a firearms permit on the basis of a 1995 misdemeanor conviction entered against him.
Chicago resident Shane Crowder’s application for the permit, made in November 2010, was subsequently denied by the city’s Department of Administrative Hearings. The Department cited the prior conviction as the reason for the denial, and affirmed the denial in a second notice mailed to Crowder after he contested the initial decision against him. Crowder’s suit, filed in Cook County Circuit Court, names a variety of entities and individuals as defendants, including the city of Chicago and the Chicago Police department.
One of the reasons this is getting so much attention has to do with the low exclusionary threshold set by the misdemeanor conviction. Misdemeanors include such minor offenses as traffic violations and trespassing, and while it might be reasonable to hold a person with a felony conviction to some particular scrutiny in his application for a firearms permit, the person with the single misdemeanor conviction, it is fair to say, could be any one of us.
As I have said before regarding the whole issue of firearms ownership and use, the right to self-preservation is both natural and inalienable. By consequence, the means to preserve a natural and inalienable right cannot be compromised. So much of the gun control discussion centers on the interpretation of the 2nd Amendment, but I posit that the 2nd Amendment should have nothing to do with the right to own a firearm. Would my natural right to life diminish because it wasn’t outlined on a piece of paper somewhere? Then my natural right to preserve that life should not diminish, either….misdemeanor conviction or no misdemeanor conviction.
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Bob Yetman, Editor-at-Large at Christian Money.com (www.christianmoney.com), is an author of a variety of materials on personal finance and investing, as well as on topics of fitness and self defense, to include the book Investor's Passport to Hedge Fund Profits (John Wiley & Sons, Inc; www.investorspassport.com) and the unarmed combat training DVD Thunderstrikes - How to Develop One Shot, One Kill Striking Power (Paladin Press; www.mikereevesonline.com).
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