EAST ST. LOUIS - U.S. District Judge McGlynn closed his bench trial on the constitutionality of the Illinois weapon ban with a story about a mob that killed dozens and burned homes in this city in 1917.
He said 39 people died in burning buildings rather than escape into gunfire. Others jumped off bridges.
He said it was a successful neighborhood.
“What if they had the kind of weapons we are talking about here?” he said.
“Some academics and jurists say the Second Amendment has nothing to say, that it's too old.
“You never know what’s going to happen to you.”
McGlynn gave both sides 30 days to propose findings of fact and conclusions of law.
They had loaded about 10,000 pages of documents into his docket the previous week as possible material for findings and conclusions.
The trial lasted four days and ran at a leisurely pace.
Proceedings started after 9 a.m. and ended before 4 p.m. each day.
Excluding recesses, the proceedings averaged four hours and 13 minutes per day.
Testimony of plaintiff witnesses Scott Pulaski, Jeffrey Eby, James Ronkainen and Randy Watt averaged almost three hours and took up more than two thirds of the time.
State’s witness Craig Tucker testified for 55 minutes and state’s witness Jason Dempsey testified for two hours and 36 minutes.
When testimony ended McGlynn described the East St. Louis riot in soft and somber tones.
No one knows how many died.
Congressional investigators found 312 houses and 44 freight cars burned.
Wikipedia’s current entry on the riot quotes from the St. Louis Argus weekly newspaper that, "The entire country has been aroused to a sense of shame and pity by the magnitude of the national disgrace enacted by the blood thirsty rioters in East St. Louis.”
The Argus began publishing in 1910 and currently publishes online.