Morton Grove: My hometown's first-in-America gun ban in jeopardy

I live in Morton Grove, which prides itself, seriously, as the first municipality in the United States to institute a handgun ban. That was back in 1981, shortly after three prominent assassination attempts took place: John Lennon in late 1980, which sadly was successful, followed by the spring 1981 shootings of Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II.

That ban may be un-banned after today's landmark Supreme Court ruling striking down a similar handgun ban in the District of Columbia. Already the National Rifle Association is taking aim (Sorry, I couldn't resist) at anti-gun laws across America, including the one in Chicago.

Now if the Morton Grove Board of Trustees and our mayor, Rick Krier, are smart, they'd vote to toss out the gun ban, and save the 22,000 residents of Morton Grove thousands of dollars in legal fees. Fighting the ban is a losing cause. Besides, crime in Morton Grove, like most middle to upper middle class suburbs (I'm middle, by the way) involves the usual array of indiscretions shared with like-minded communities: shoplifting, driving under the influence, home burglaries, fistfights, petty vandalism, and domestic abuse. There may be a person or two who have reasons to fear for their lives, but as far as crime goes, making handguns legal won't change things much here. And almost all of those burglaries, like most others, take place when no one is home.

But late last year Morton Grove police were called to the home of a man who lives four blocks from me because his adult son told the cops his father had a handgun. The police didn't find any firearms, but discovered the man was allegedly producing fake credit cards.

Most, if not all of the arrests of people possessing handguns in Morton Grove are of motorists pulled over for serious driving indiscretions--this allows the police to search the offender's vehicle, where a gun is sometimes found.

Here is some background on the gun ban--from Morton Grove, 100 Years, A Tradition of Service, published in 1995.

On June 8, 1981, the Morton Grove Board of Trustees passed two ordinances relating to firearms. One prohibits the sale of handguns within the village, the other restricts the possession of handguns within the village. The genesis of these ordinances was in direct response to residents' requests that a gun store be prohibited from opening and doing business in their neighborhood.

During their thorough study of the issue, several trustees felt it appropriate to consider the broader question of handgun control. The result of their deliberations, which were closely watched and presented to the world by the international news media, was a vote of five to one to prohibit the sale of handguns and a vote of four to two to restrict the possession of handguns.

As a result, Morton Grove residents who own handguns have the option of storing them out of town or at a licenced gun club. The regulation is on handguns only and no other legally owned firearms.

As expected, the handgun ban was challenged in court, but Morton Grove won each round--and the US Supreme Court declined to hear the case after the village prevailed in a federal appeals court.

That was then, but today the Supreme Court ruled in favor of an individual right to bear arms.

And no, I don't own a handgun. I'm a law-abiding person.

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WorldNet Daily gets it wrong on my hometown

WorldNet Daily likes to jump in on stories quickly--sometimes too quickly. In response to the renewed debate on gun-control, WorldNet tried the tired high-school formula of "compare and contrast."

In 1981, years before I moved here, Morton Grove, Illinois enacted a handgun ban, the first in the nation. In response, the Cobb County, Georgia town of Kennesaw made it law that each household own a gun. Crime would go up in the "Wild West" atmosphere of the new Kennesaw, and go down in Morton Grove according to the "experts" at the time.

From WorldNet Daily:

The crime rate (in Kennesaw) initially plummeted for several years after the passage of the ordinance, with the 2005 per capita crime rate actually significantly lower than it was in 1981, the year before passage of the law.

Prior to enactment of the law, Kennesaw had a population of just 5,242 but a crime rate significantly higher (4,332 per 100,000) than the national average (3,899 per 100,000). The latest statistics available – for the year 2005 – show the rate at 2,027 per 100,000. Meanwhile, the population has skyrocketed to 28,189.

By comparison, the population of Morton Grove, the first city in Illinois to adopt a gun ban for anyone other than police officers, has actually dropped slightly and stands at 22,202, according to 2005 statistics. More significantly, perhaps, the city's crime rate increased by 15.7 percent immediately after the gun ban, even though the overall crime rate in Cook County rose only 3 percent. Today, by comparison, the township's crime rate stands at 2,268 per 100,000.

Kennesaw's population has soared for one simple reason--the town was overrun by the sprawl of Atlanta. The same thing happened to Morton Grove right after World War II, but as empty-nesters became prevalent in the 1980s among post-war suburban boom-towns, the population went down, as it did in hundreds of similar towns during that time.

I don't have the statistics in front of me, but crime in Morton Grove went up in the 1980s and 1990s largely because a seedy strip of motels on Waukegan Avenue became the residence of choice of drug dealers, prostitutes, and other no-goodnicks. The Village of Morton Grove, exercising its eminent domain powers, tore down the motels in 1999 so a renaissance of Waukegan Road could bloom. Crime went down a lot across Morton Grove (Gee, I wonder who committed all those offenses?) but the Waukegan Road commercial renewal is something we're still waiting for here.

But the new street lights are real pretty.

Since I moved here in 1999, I know of two murders in Morton Grove. The first one involved an Oklahoma drifter who somehow ended up dead in a forest preserve outhouse near the local running path. The other killing involved a businessman whose body was found around 2003, wrapped in concrete and placed on the roof of one of my favorite restaurants. Roofers working on a neighboring business noted something odd, and found the entombed victim, who was likely killed because of numerous bad business dealings. He was last seen alive in the mid 1990s.

I can't remember if the victims were shot to death, but even if there wasn't a handgun ban here, it probably wouldn't have made a difference for the two men.

The handgun ban is a stupid law, but to say crime is higher Morton Grove because of it is disingenuous. As with most middle class suburbs, Morton Grove crime largely consists of shoplifting, small-scale burglaries, domestic disputes, vandalism and incidents of drug possession. A local politician told me a couple of years ago that the only arrests he knows of involving violations of the handgun ban involve oblivious drivers being pulled over on a traffic offense--with the police discovering a gun inside the vehicle. Needless to say, although I'm not one of them, there are handgun owners living in Morton Grove

Do a little more research next time, WorldNet.

Oh, in late 2005, while running not too far from the spot where the drifter's body was found, a Cook County Forest Preserve policeman, on a bitterly cold day, confronted me about allegedly--and I want to reiterate, allegedly, urinating fairly deep inside a grove of trees. No one else was there, which says a lot about the law enforcement force derisively known at "the tree police."

I told him I was stretching, and he drove away.

That Morton Grove "crime" went unreported.

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