Evanston Votes To Amend Gun Ban—Tries To Avoid NRA Lawsuit

[tracker]

Friday, July 18, 2008

Unlike the debacle in Washington, D.C., in the wake of the Supreme Court's Heller decision -- and in an effort to avoid NRA's lawsuit against their city -- aldermen in the Chicago suburb of Evanston unanimously voted to amend the city's 27-year-old handgun ban at a recent closed-door meeting.

The day after the Supreme Court ruled that laws requiring handguns in homes be disassembled and outfitted with trigger locks are incompatible with the gun rights accorded under the Second Amendment, NRA filed lawsuits challenging local gun bans in Chicago and the suburban towns of Evanston, Morton Grove, and Oak Park. Evanston city council members subsequently authorized a resolution that would rewrite their city's ordinance to comply with the Supreme Court ruling and avoid the NRA lawsuit.

"No one was particularly happy or anxious to do anything that would change the ordinance," Alderman Edmund Moran (6th) said. "But we're being confronted with this lawsuit and rather than engaging in a protracted fight and spending a lot of money, it would be a better course of action to revise our ordinance in a way that it would make it more legally sustainable."

With a new ordinance in place, the city of Evanston is now seeking to have the NRA lawsuit dismissed.

Rest assured we will keep you apprised of any future developments.

NRA

[tattedupboy]

It's too bad that the threat of an expensive lawsuit is what it took to return to the way things already should have been. Had this unconstitutional ordinance never been passed, the city would not be going through this.