Chicago store clerk successfully defends himself--will he go to jail for it (that is illegal in Chicago, you know)?

A clerk at a Chicago hardware store shot an armed robber in the head, according to CBS 2 Chicago News (you can also see video of the news report). The store is one block away from another that was robbed at gun point last week. Now most of us might figure "one thug seriously wounded, and no one else hurt--sounds like a pretty good outcome, to me," but there is a hitch.

As one can learn in this excellent, concise history of the Chicago campaign against self-defense, all guns in Chicago must be registered, and in a deliberately engineered Catch-22, handguns that were not registered by 1982 cannot be registered. Granted, I suppose it's possible that this hardware store clerk registered his gun 25 years ago (and every two years since), but I find it unlikely. If my suspicion is correct, then the fact of the clearly self-defense nature of the shooting notwithstanding, his possession of the gun could land him in jail.

Fits, at Shooting the Messenger, believes that precisely that is what will happen (if, indeed, the gun was unregistered).

While he may very well be right, I'm not so sure. I realize I am risking accusations of racism here (but I have decided that I do not care enough about the opinions of people stupid enough to believe I am racist to worry about what they think or say)--there could be some significance in what a clerk at the currency exchange (next door to the hardware store) pointed out: "This was a black-owned business. Black-owned." As eager as Mayor Daley, Jesse Jackson, "Snuffy" Pfleger, etc. are to crush those who own guns under the wheels of their brand of "justice," they make quite a point of claiming that their efforts are geared in large part to helping the black community (Laura Washington clearly thinks the race card is the ace in the civilian disarmament lobby's hand)--throwing blacks under the bus for using guns to defend themselves from criminals might put more of a hole in that myth than they are willing to risk.

Frankly, the fight for gun rights in Illinois might benefit from a decision to prosecute the brave clerk (Parker, er . . . Heller v District of Columbia, anyone?) , but I cannot wish that nightmare on him. Besides, his courageous stand has already demonstrated the benefits of peaceable people having the power to fight back against thugs.

Therefore, the Chicago bosses may just decide to let this incident fade away quietly. Interestingly (but not particularly surprisingly), the media might be playing along with such an endeavor--the CBS 2 Chicago News story I linked to at the beginning of this post is the only one I can find.

I guess the defensive use of firearms is not as newsworthy as atrocities committed with them (and what does that say about the relative frequency of those two types of gun use?).