Sun-Times corrected this boo-boo, which can be found here, at a Google search page and was not wrong in hard copy: “It was Devine design.”

Yes, there was a state’s attorney named Devine, but no, it was not his design for Otis McDonald to become lead complainant in the case v. Chi’s gun ordinance in the U.S. Supreme Court.  McD had divinity in mind, not the immediate past state’s attorney.

He and the ordinance and why he’s fighting it with help of “gun lobby” people is told in a quite good piece today by Mark Konkol, one of S-T’s hard-at-work conveyors of hard reporting.

McD has had enough and isn’t taking it any more, that’s why.  He’s a 21st-century urban hero who looks back on his sharecropper mother in Louisiana who cashed in her piggy bank, all $18, to buy him a ride to Chi in 1951, when  he was 17, so he could find, that is make, for himself a better life.

He became a janitor at U. of Chi, making “waves on campus” by applying for a promotion to building engineer when no blacks were applying because it just wasn’t done.  Now in his S. Side, Morgan Park neighborhood home, where he lives with his wife and daughter and has grandchildren as visitors, he is standing up to be counted as one who would be armed.

As a kid in Louisiana — seven years old — he went into the woods and bagged all manner of wild creatures who could be eaten and skinned.

Out there by myself. I’d get me some rabbits, squirrels, ‘coons, opossums,

he told Konkol.

When a kid tried to break into his garage, he levelled his long gun at him and counselled him henceforward to stay away, which the kid did.

But when three guys blocked his car on his way to the Jewel, “cussing … saying, ‘I’ll put you down, you old gray-haired mothers-and-such; I’ll put you down,” because he’d done the good-citizen thing as Mayor Daley recommends, calling cops on gun-toters earlier, he had no way to defend himself.  He wants that to change, so it’s McDonald vs. the city (and my own Oak Park, piggy-backing on Chi) at the high court.

The mayor?  He wishes he could get him to “feel and see what” he sees.

”Maybe he could come here and spend the night, especially during the summer, and listen to what I listen to out my window. If he could, and he was open to that, he would see what’s really going on in his city … and maybe he would understand where I’m coming from.”

Something like that would win some votes too.  Daley should take note.