It is endlessly fascinating to watch Chicago Mayor Richard Daley continue to fight any effort to overturn local laws absolutely prohibiting gun ownership, even inside of the home. In response to the landmark Supreme Court decision District of Columbia v. Heller, which held that the Second Amendment explicates an individual right to keep and bear weapons for hunting, for self-defense, and, in the last extreme, for the overthrow of a corrupt government, Daley sarcastically said this:

“Oh, because the Supreme Court’s done it we’re just gonna dismiss it and all of a sudden people can arm themselves.”

The statement is telling, as it presumes that weapons ownership is incontrovertibly evil, undesireable, and without benefit. Daley statements are often in this vein, unjustifiably assuming that eliminating guns is the “only” way to secure the safety of Chicago’s youth.

Mayor Daley’s assumption is based on a grain of truth: guns are dangerous.  Guns aren’t toys, sporting devices, or tools.  They are weapons intended to do harm, and the best safety practices in the world cannot make them completely safe.  When Mayor Daley laments that a world with legal gun ownership is a dangerous world, he is telling the truth.

He is not, however, telling the whole truth.  There is another side to the story.  With or without guns, the world is a dangerous place, which harbors a few violent people who will hurt whoever they can, whenever the opportunity presents, regardless of whether they are able to obtain a gun.  A criminal is definitionally lawless; it follows, therefore, that no gun control law will deter him from arming himself. It is folly to think that a man willing to risk 15 years in prison to rob a bank or rape a woman will refuse to carry a gun for fear of a few more years in the can.

Another part of the truth that Mayor Daley neglects to tell is that the police cannot and will not protect each of us twenty-four hours per day.  When a criminal commits an act of violence, the police arrive after the fact, investigate, and clean up the mess. Their mission is no greater, and they are equipped to do no more. Attacks–even fatal ones–last mere seconds. Despite their best efforts, the police are rarely able to arrive in time to save the victim from harm.

In the name of making safe a dangerous world, Mayor Daley merely creates a worse state of danger. A citizenry that is legally compelled to wait for the police rather than resist an attack itself has literally placed its lives into the hands of the government. History has shown there is no more dangerous place.

Putting aside the specter and possibility of government violence against an unarmed population, Daley’s gun-less utopia creates (as Chicago’s crime statistics demonstrate) huge unavoidable risks for vulnerable individuals. Through most of history, the small and weak were the primary victims of crime for the simple reason that physical strength was the most important factor in determining who would prevail in a physical struggle.  It is an ugly but undeniable truth that a 120-pound woman (even armed with a bottle of pepper spray or other trendy non-lethal ‘weapon’) doesn’t stand a fighting chance against a strong and determined male aggressor.  Of all the inventions in all of human history, only one enables a small woman to defend herself on equal terms against a drastically larger and stronger aggressor: a gun.  With a gun and adequate training, the physically weak need not be victims.  In a society with enough gun owners, criminals can no longer safely choose victims based on size or gender, because a 120-pound woman becomes as potentially risky a target as a 250-pound man.  In such a society–an anti-Daley utopia, so to speak–a violent criminal cannot be certain of attacking anyone without risking a deadly response.

The categorical gun control advocated by Mayor Daley will not change the ugly facts of violence, nor will it alter the crime statistics of the city of Chicago. The only change that would affect the hard realities of brute force in favor of law-abiding citizens is the change Daley is so committed to fighting that he mocked the Supreme Court for stating the plain fact of the Second Amendment’s meaning. Daley’s utopia has no room for rights, particularly those that create less reliance on government.

There is, of course, an even more compelling reason for the legal ownership of guns–and, for that reason, one even more anathema to Mayor Daley. The drafters of our Constitution determined that only way to keep the our government out of corrupt and dictatorial hands was to give the people the means to slap those hands away, should such drastic action ever become necessary.  This promise, and its consequences, is one of the bedrock principles of government.  The Second Amendment embodies a value judgment by the Founders that we are simply not entitled to purchase a false promise of security by disarming ourselves, and thus putting at risk all of our liberties and the future of liberty itself. Mayor Daley thinks he knows better, and he would strike the fool’s bargain the Constitution prohibits us from making.