Just a day after seeing it for the first time, aldermen on Wednesday signed off on the Emanuel administration’s ordinance scrapping the city’s ban on gun ranges.
Such swiftness is nothing new—last year the council passed the Daley administration’s new gun ownership law just a day after it was introduced and well before most aldermen had read it.
What’s changed is that last year’s law was passed after the U.S. Supreme Court shot down Chicago’s 28-year-old ban on handguns and mocked the logic of city officials who defended it. This time the mayor and the council tried to act before a federal court made them.
They didn’t quite get it done: passage of the new gun range law came about the same time as a decision by the Seventh Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals that chastised city officials for substituting rhetoric and politics for a coherent policy on firearms.