This looks to me like a pretty clear cut First Amendment violation by a Chicago suburb:
“Without legal authority and in violation of the Constitution, my client, a federally licensed firearms dealer, was delayed by the village when he initially applied for a weapons dealers business license in Norridge,†Maksym said.
“When village officials realized they couldn’t stop him from obtaining a gun dealer’s license, they arbitrarily imposed more restrictions on him without any legal basis.â€
After failing to keep Kole from opening, Maksym said, his client was restricted by the village from advertising.
That should be a slam dunk in court. It might be permissible for a local governmental entity to regulate advertising generally, but it do it on the basis of content has no basis. I just hope his attorney is decent. They should not be able to condition the exercise of one constitutional right on the surrendering of another.
Man, if they start arbitrarily violating BOTH of the first two amendments, they’re going to be in a world of hurt very fast.
This has been going on for awhile now. The city really screwed up and they’re going to take some heat for it.
Under normal circumstances I would say that this would be a slam dunk in court. However, this is a Chicago suburb so all bets are off.
Walter Maksym has a lot of experience with gun-rights cases in the Chicagoland area. He has represented gun owners in criminal cases as well as litigating.
I’d use Maksym if I had legal troubles over gun rights in Chicago (a term which, to my people, means anwhere in the northeastern corner of Illinois, more or less.)
Not anti-gun, Anti-Freedom. All of them.
Chicago is Mordor. It radiates evil and oppression.
We do it to cigarette makers all the time.
This is a critical case; please let us know how it turns out. If they can treat guns the way they treat cigarettes, gun ownership will be substantially reduced.
Markie Marxist sez: “So what if we suppressed his advertising? We’d send him to the gulag to be tortured to death if we could. We were being nice to him! By communist standards anyway.”