Senate Bill 1657, the Gun Dealer Licensing Act, passed last week  in the Illinois Senate, creating a gun dealer licensing scheme designed to drive small gun dealers and collectors out of business, and which would make it legally impossible for private citizens to liquidate their gun collections, as it limits them to selling nine guns a year without an FFL, but the federal government won’t issue an FFL to someone for the sole purpose of liquidating a gun collection.

Put bluntly…

Illinois gun owners and gun rights supporters need to focus their efforts on stopping the Gun Dealer Licensing Act (SB 1657) in the Illinois House, where 51 Republicans and 67 Democrats in the 118-seat deliberative body will decide whether the act passes or fails. It would not hurt to lobby Republican Governor Bruce Rauner to crush the anti-gun bill with a veto if it passes the house and comes to his desk.

This bill must be stopped, and for it to be stopped, the hysteria we’re seeing among Second Amendment advocates has to stop for us to come together to crush this bill.

The witch hunt being conducted against two gun companies behind a 527 lobbying organization that dropped the ball and allowed SB 1657 to pass in the Senate needs to be set aside so we can crush SB 1657, and render the whole issue irrelevant.

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Now, let’s talk about that witch hunting mob, and those hysterical souls whipping it into being based on what are at best half-truths and scandalous assertions unsupported by facts.

The most disgusting reality in the Second Amendment community is that so many people on the fringes of it are willing—and sometimes flat out eager—to engage in witch hunts after reading single-sourced, sensationalist stories. They’re amusingly incapable of any sort of introspection, and can’t see that their screams of “treason!” and demands for boycotts against the targets of poorly-written articles of questionable veracity shows that they’re cut from the same hysterical cloth as the gun control supporting progressives they claim to despise.

It’s quite clear that the writer and editorial staff of an allegedly pro-gun media outlet attempting to burn Springfield Armory and Rock River Arms to the ground don’t understand how practical politics works.

Let me break it down for them (who should know better), and for you (if you don’t know already).

Politicians get elected into office. Depending on where you are in the country, the majority of politicians in a given state may be more gun-friendly, or they may be more anti-gun, based upon the culture of the electorate that put them in office. In Illinois, which has been dominated by the Democrat political machine in Chicago for generations, the majority of politicians tend to be anti-gun Democrats. That’s a simple, unavoidable truth about Illinois politics that even a child can understand.

Another simple to understand concept is that because Chicago’s corrupt political machine dominates Illinois politics, the sad reality is that large companies in every industry “pay to play” to gain access to politicians to get things done, even more than they do in many other places.

These “things” obviously vary greatly, from (totally illegal) kickback schemes if a certain company is granted favors, to the much more common practice of companies and special interest groups and their officers and lobbyists making lawful campaign contributions so that when they need to talk to politicians about an issue, then the politicians will take some of their time for phone calls or meetings to hear the concerns of the company or lobbyist.

A writer for an allegedly pro-gun media outlet has been attempting to claim over the past few days that Springfield Armory and Rock River Arms were behind a scheme to exempt them from the Gun Dealer Licensing Act. There wasn’t any evidence at all to actually support that assertion. Springfield Armory and Rock River Arms pointed out the fact that while they provide the bulk of the funding for the Illinois Firearms Manufacturing Association (IMFA), neither company runs the lobbying organization. They trust the IFMA to do good work, as they have shared common goals. As both SA and RRA have made clear in their press releases, they were not aware of the carve outs in the Gun Dealer Licensing Act.

Having the veracity of their claims challenged—and having failed to lynch two companies with decades in the industry who have never given anyone any reason to question their support for the Second Amendment before—the same allegedly pro-gun media outlet then revealed the “news” that companies make campaign contributions to politicians on every side of the issue, including those that they don’t support or like, in order to have access.

You know who played this game particularly well as a businessman, in Illinois, and across the nation and world?

Yes, devoted champion of the Second Amendment and 45th President of the United States Donald Trump donated money to politicians in both parties on local, state, and national levels because it was good for business. The truth about politics is that making contributions enabled people to arrange meetings to sit down with politicians and and make compelling arguments for positions they support, or legislation that they desire.

This is how politics operates. This is how power operates. This is how companies get the standing to earn a few minutes of time from politicians who may not agree with them, and win concessions and compromises that favor an entire industry, and in some cases, the rights of a citizenry that may otherwise be muted entirely.

I’m been seeing a lot of smears of two companies with long records of supporting the Second Amendment, based solely on the assertions made by one writer in one allegedly pro-gun media outlet.

Springfield Armory has been around for 43 years. Rock River Arms has been around for 21 years.

Both companies have been staunch supporters of gun rights and liberty for the entire time they’ve been in business.

That’s not the truth about their current critics.

Maybe you should consider the source of the witch hunt before you start believing that witches are real.