Local man at center of case on handgun law

by Patrick Thomas

As a boy whose mother would give him a free pass on eating his veggies if he shot rabbits that were plundering the family farm in Louisiana, Otis McDonald has, not surprisingly, grown up to be a man who believes in the right of citizens to own a handgun.

But sitting in the living room of his modest frame house on the 10700 block of South Church Street, he doesn’t appear to be a man poised to play a role in one of the most significant Second Amendment cases in U.S. Supreme Court history.

After taking his lawsuit against the city of Chicago before the U.S. Supreme Court on March 2, McDonald, 76, is on the verge of symbolizing the end to the handgun ban in Chicago—if his case sways the opinion of the high court.

“If you haven’t given your life for something, then you haven’t lived,” McDonald said, quoting his mother Lois. “In life, to get anything you want worth your efforts or worth anything at all, you’ve got to be willing to sacrifice.”

If the Supreme Court were to strike down the Chicago handgun ban, it could have major ramifications across the country, opening the door to constitutional challenges on local or state levels.

Confident his case will be won when the U.S. Supreme Court rules on it this summer, McDonald said the trip to the land’s highest court was an overwhelming experience.

“You can’t imagine, for a guy from a sharecropping family in Louisiana to have confronted what I confronted in the last couple of days. It’s been indescribable. There are no words to express what I have felt these past days,” McDonald said. “There are just a whole lot of different feelings, memories and times when this was probably totally impossible, or seemed to the world and certainly to the black generation.”

Frustrated over crime in his Morgan Park neighborhood, McDonald regularly attends Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy (CAPS) meetings in the 22nd District. He said his fight to lift the handgun ban is an issue that represents something larger than himself. He said he is determined to represent people who feel unsafe in their homes. He described his Washington, D.C., experience as a “rush.”

“It was a good feeling, not an individual feeling. It was not just for myself. It was bigger than that. It was for the country, the citizens of Chicago, the citizens of Cook County and, specifically, for elderly people and retirees,” he said. “I had this rush about them.”

McDonald said he is saddened that the ills of society have brought him to the point of needing a handgun in his Morgan Park home.

“There was a sad feeling for the younger generation who are mostly causing so much havoc, not so much in the city and county, but in the world today and the United States. This was a sad feeling to me,” he said. “If I could, I would reach out and grab each child who is on the wrong track. I would do this in a second with every right and every hope that I have in my life or ever had for any human being. If I can convey that to them and get them to see life from my perspective, I would give my life easily.”

Since moving to his home in 1972 with his wife Laura and raising three children, McDonald said, his home has been burglarized three times, mainly by local youths. On one occasion, a boy no older than 14 was trying to break into McDonald’s garage. The U.S. Army veteran sneaked into the backyard while aiming a rifle and ordered the boy off his property.

McDonald has taken other measures to protect his wife, himself and his property, like installing steel security doors and burglar alarms. But, he believes it is his right to possess a handgun.

“Having the right to have a handgun in my own home is going to make me feel comfortable. I don’t know how much it will curtail crime, but it will make me feel safer and my neighbors in the city safer in their homes.”

McDonald grew up the eighth of 12 children in Fort Necessity, La., home to a few stores, a small post office and a cotton gin. His father, Mose McDonald, taught him how to read. They would lie on the floor with the Bible while holding a kerosene lamp and an old set of eyeglasses that was missing a lens.

“He had gone to school one day in his life, but he could read the Bible like nobody I have ever met,” McDonald said.

When his sharecropping family wasn’t growing cotton or corn, they were hunting. McDonald received his first gun, a single-shot rifle for hunting rabbits, at age 11. He said that on his first hunt he was more worried about hurting his shoulder from the recoil than he was about hitting his target. But over time he learned to use the weapon with skill.

When he was in his late teens, his mother Lois used the last $18 she had to buy him a ride to Chicago. He worked odd jobs before he entered the Army near the end of the Korean War. McDonald was stationed in Germany where he learned to fire various weapons, including automatic weapons.

McDonald, who retired in 1999 after a 32-year career at the University of Chicago, said he has never been one to back down from a struggle. He started as a janitor at the university, and despite racial obstacles, he worked his way up to become the lead engineer and president of Local 321 of the engineers union, overseeing hundreds of building engineers on the campus.

These days, McDonald frequently travels to southern Illinois to hunt. He has hunted with crossbows, rifles, shotguns and pistols. In 2005, Mc- Donald became active in the pro-gun lobby and started attending gun rallies in Springfield. A hunting friend introduced him to attorney Alan Gura, who became the lead attorney in the suit against Chicago’s handgun ban. After finding several other plaintiffs, Gura selected McDonald as the lead plaintiff.

While critics have contended that McDonald is being used as a pawn to support the aims of gun advocates, the Morgan Park retiree thinks otherwise.

“It’s difficult to think you are being used when you are seeking them out for help,” he said.

However, city officials, namely Mayor Richard M. Daley and leaders in the Chicago Police Department, have been outspoken in their desire to keep the handgun ban. Their fears grew following the Supreme Court’s 2008 decision to strike down a Washington, D.C., law that prohibited handguns. The court ruled it was a violation of the Second Amendment. The justices said in their decision that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to possess a firearm for private use in federal districts.

In the Chicago case, Supreme Court justices will decide whether that ruling should apply to local and state jurisdictions as well. Police officials hope the handgun ban will not be lifted or that some regulation on the weapons will remain in place.

“I think we have to wait and see how they rule,” Chicago Police Supt. Jody Weis said at an unrelated event at St. Xavier University on March 3. “My guess is they are going to come down the middle. They’ll come up with something, and they’ll still allow states to regulate.

“For us, the worst-case scenario is they turn around the handgun ban in Chicago, but I’m confident they would not take away the city or the state’s rights to regulate guns.”

Weis said that what is often forgotten in the debate over handguns in Chicago is that registered firearm owners are already legally allowed to keep rifles and shotguns in their homes.

“In terms of personal protection, I don’t think there is a more formidable weapon than a shotgun inside of a home, so we kind of forget that. Everybody wants a handgun, but in reality, if I were given the option to protect my home with a handgun, a rifle or shotgun, I would take a shotgun. That’s legal, and I think sometimes it keeps coming out like all weapons are banned in Chicago, and they aren’t. So it’s going to be interesting to see how the court rules. Hopefully, we’ll get a decision, and we’ll deal with whatever they come up with.”

Weis said handguns do not keep people safe, especially youths who are inexperienced in handling them. For someone not trained, a handgun is a relatively inaccurate weapon, Weis said, and the proliferation of handguns makes the job of a police officer more dangerous.

“Guns are such a threat to our society, and my biggest fear is that if they are going to allow handguns in Chicago, every police officer is going to have to assume every person has a handgun. But more importantly, if a lot of people go out and buy a handgun, don’t receive adequate training and don’t really understand the dangers, now you have a new weapon. It’s easily concealable, and kids are going to have access to these.”

Statistics show that handgun deaths usually result at the hands of someone the victim knows. Emotional conflicts can turn deadly, especially with young people.

“The young man and young woman who get in an argument with their friend and they are upset, they are emotionally charged, and they don’t have the emotional maturity—if they don’t have those conflict resolution or anger-management skills, how are they going to solve their problems? They are going to get that new gun that their mom or dad just bought them because kids always know where the guns are, and that’s my fear,” Weis said.

“There will be a lot more guns put into the homes, and they won’t be adequately secure and will be more accessible to our kids. At the end of the day, it’s all about keeping our young people safe. … injecting more weapons into the city of Chicago and residents, for whatever good reasons, I don’t think that does anything to protect our youth.”

McDonald agreed that no person registering for a gun should be able to start shooting without proper training. But he said he isn’t lawfully given the same protection as police officers are, like Weis, who can carry a handgun, and Daley, who is protected by bodyguards.

“When you are walking around and you carry anything around you want to, you can say these things,” McDonald said. “It’s virtually impossible for him to feel what I feel, when my rights have been violated and I live where people can walk around and curse me out and threaten me anytime they get ready to. [Criminals] can come into my house when they want, and they can get in here any way they want to get in here.”

McDonald understands he already has the right to keep a shotgun or rifle, but those weapons don’t make him feel safe.

“The main thing that I’m concerned about is me lying up there asleep and waking up to a noise downstairs. And then I got to get up and get a shotgun, take it out of the case and load it. In the meantime, somebody is blowing me and my wife away. That’s what I’m concerned about for myself and so many others.”

McDonald said law-abiding citizens should not be blamed for gun violence. He believes crime has risen since the Chicago handgun ban went into effect in 1982. He credits that trend to mounting restrictions on police making arrests and the recent economic conditions, where criminals are more desperate.

“The main thing I would like officials to understand is that we are not the problem. We are not out there killing other people,” McDonald said. “Before 1982 this wasn’t happening. We weren’t running out there shooting people.”

If crime decreases by lifting the handgun ban and makes law-abiding citizens more comfortable, McDonald said his opponents like Daley will one day thank him.

“I hope [Daley] doesn’t take it personally. I hope one day he’ll look back on it and say that wasn’t bad. That was something good that helped. If it helps just a little bit, that is help,” McDonald said.

“These laws that we are talking about are only designed to mess with a legal, law-abiding citizen because it’s impossible that it’s going to have any effect on the people who are getting the guns and using them illegally.”

This is part of the March 10, 2010 online edition of The Beverly Review.

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