Attorney reviews options to protect Wilmette's gun ban

Over much of the last year, Wilmette village officials did what they could to mobilize support against a bill in Springfield they feared would effectively overturn a local handgun ban. In the week since that bill became law, they have been looking for legal options to prevent its implementation.

The backstory here: an Illinois homeowner shot a burglar with a handgun while living in a particularly annoying Chicago suburb that purports to ban handguns. The shooting was ruled legal, but he was convicted of possessing a handgun in violation of the ban and fined. The legislature passed a law that prohibited using the law to charge someone who used their handgun in self-defense. The governor veto'd it. The legislature overrode the veto.

Now the town's lawyers are claiming that the state law, which was passed specifically to preempt this situation, doesn't apply due to so-called home rule powers. As you may recall, Denver used the same argument recently in order to preserve its own local gun control laws.

Frankly, it doesn't make much sense to me. Any "home rule" authority derives from the authority of the state that grants it, and the state is free to modify or revoke that grant at its whim. That's exactly what the Colorado and Illinois statutes were intended to do. But these townships will grasp at anything they can in order to retain their gun control laws, because they don't really care about whether they have the legal authority, or even if it's the right thing to do.