Chicago Alderman Edward Burke introduced an ordinance last week that
would allow museums in the Windy City to possess and display unloaded
guns classified as “curios or relics” after learning that the Pritzker
Military Library and other city museums are currently banned from
including them in exhibits. If passed, the museum’s president and CEO
told FoxNews.com it would allow its estimated 15,000 annual visitors to
see a significant World War II artifact personally returned stateside
from a now-deceased U.S. Army officer.
“Alderman Burke heard our story about this and really came to the
same conclusion we did – there’s really no clear code for museums,” Ken
Clarke said Tuesday. “And because of the lack of clarity, we haven’t
taken any chances. So rather than hope for the best, we wanted to do
this properly.”
A German Walther PP 7.65-mm. handgun donated to the museum by
relatives of U.S. Army Maj. Gen. William P. Levine — one of the
highest-ranking Jewish generals in American history — is currently kept
in a safe along with a dozen other handguns at a gun range in suburban
Lombard, where they are exempt from the Chicago Firearms Ordinance,
Clarke said.
"For us, it means a heck of a lot historically.”
- Ken Clarke, Pritzker Military Library
“General Levine had the very unique experience of interviewing both
captors and captives at Dachau as a U.S. intelligence officer,” Clarke
said. “So when you actually have a story attached to Levine, the
historical value goes through the roof. For us, it means a heck of a lot
historically.”
Under Burke’s proposal, which was formally introduced on Wednesday,
Chicago museums would be permitted to display unloaded firearms like
Levine’s firearm if classified as “curios and relics,” which are defined
by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives as firearms
that are at least 50 years old, certified by the curator of a municipal,
state or federal museum or any gun that derives a “substantial part” of
its monetary value from rare features or associations with historical
figures, periods or events.
“Chicago is home to several world-class museums,” Burke said in a
statement. “And it has come to my attention that such an exemption is
reasonably warranted to allow such institutions to display unloaded
firearms that often accompany uniforms and other historical artifacts.”
Levine, with the permission from U.S. military officials, brought the
handgun back to the United States after 30 years in the Army Reserve.
His experiences at the concentration camp near Munich reportedly haunted
him for nearly four decades after the war.
"Every time he'd talk about it, when he'd come to the sentence, 'And
then I came to Dachau,' he'd break down," his wife Rhoda told the
Chicago Tribune in April. "He couldn't get that sentence out without the
vivid memory of it. That choked him up."
In 1995, Levine told the newspaper he ultimately began to share his
experiences to local high school and college students, as well as with
visitors at the Illinois Holocaust Museum, as a way to educate others
about the atrocities of war.
"For me, the most important and effective method of preventing another Holocaust is truth and education," Levine said.
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