You know Rahm Emanuel, the then-Obama chief of staff whose motto was never let a crisis go to waste. He’s desperately fought the easing of unconstitutional gun laws in Illinois and Chicago for as long as he’s been mayor or Murder City.
Hizzoner has a long and distinguished record of failure in holding back the Second Amendment rights of the people of his city. He’s impotently watching as the Supreme Court ruled that the Second Amendment applies to cities and states. Then gnashed his teeth as concealed carry was legalized in the Land o’ Lincoln. And after throwing up legal roadblocks to gun stores opening within city limits, well, he took it in the shorts on that one, too.
But that was then. Now…
Mayor Rahm Emanuel wants banks doing business with the city to set gun-control sales restrictions on their business customers.
It’s a potentially far-reaching measure that could raise the media-conscious mayor’s national profile on a much-covered issue.
“Media-conscious”? I think they mis-spelled “attention whoring”.
Emanuel and influential 14th Ward Ald. Edward Burke, who also knows a thing or two about getting headlines on hot-button topics, have introduced the “Safe Guns Policy” ordinance. The measure would require banks and financial institutions that work with the city to only take on arms-selling customers if they set certain restrictions.
That includes selling guns or bullets only to people 21 or older; requiring background checks on all gun sales; banning the sale of bump stocks that allow semi-automatic weapons to fire bullets at nearly the speed of machine guns; and not selling high-capacity magazines.
Rahm was apparently impressed by the precedent set by Citigroup last month and wants any bank that would do business with his virtually bankrupt city to follow a similar course.
“The private sector has a role to play in supporting public safety,” Emanuel said in a news release. “Chicago should give our business to companies who share our values and want to be part of the solution to gun violence, not profit from it.”
Rahm knows how to may mau with the best of them. He’ll no doubt find more than a few financial institutions that want the city’s deposits more than they value the business of the handful of area gun retailers that would fall under such an edict. But the practical effect of this will be virtually nil.
Chuck’s Guns and the rest won’t have any trouble finding local banks — banks that don’t do business with the city — that want their business. But that’s OK. Hizzoner will have gotten his name in the papers and on the local nightly news, piggybacking on the virtue-signaling anti-gunapalooza that was the March for our Lives and the rest of the post-Parkland gun control fury. Same as it ever was.