Dem Dominated Legislatures Take Aim At Legal Gun Owners

While gun control legislation appears to be bottled up in Washington, D.C. at the moment, anti-gun lawmakers in Delaware and Illinois are rapidly moving to restrict the rights of legal gun owners while leaving violent criminals untouched. On today’s Bearing Arms’ Cam & Co, we take a closer look at what’s going on in places where the Democrats in control of the statehouses are busy trying to create brand new non-violent crimes out of our right to keep and bear arms.

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Gun control advocates haven’t given up on D.C. yet. They’re encouraging Joe Biden to swiftly enact new executive orders, but a growing number of anti-gun activists are now suggesting that Congress adopt virtually any legislation that can get 60 votes.

At the state level, however, those same activists are pushing go as far as they can in placing new restrictions on legal gun owners. As the National Rifle Association describes a pair of gun control bills that are being fast-tracked in Delaware:

Senate Bill 6, the so-called “Delaware Large Capacity Magazine Prohibition Act,” bans possessing magazines with a capacity greater than seventeen rounds of ammunition. Such arbitrary limits are not grounded in public safety and, instead, restrict law-abiding citizens who use these magazines for various purposes, such as self-defense and competition.

Senate Bill 3 requires prospective purchasers or recipients of a handgun to first have a “handgun qualified purchaser card,” which requires a training course. While those with a carry permit are exempt from the training requirement, they are not exempt from the license. In addition, it requires information regarding prospective handgun purchasers be made available to state law-enforcement, and does not prohibit law-enforcement from retaining records of purchasers, and of the firearms purchased. This provision essentially creates a state registry of handguns.

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The Delaware magazine ban would prohibit current owners from keeping the magazines already in their possession. Instead, they would be forced to hand over any ammo mag that can accept more than 17 rounds to law enforcement by June 30th, 2022. The legislation calls on the state’s Department of Safety and Homeland Security to create a compensated confiscation program that would pay those owners some stipend for the magazines that are turned in, though the bill is silent on how much money would be offered and only appropriates $15,000 to pay for the program.

In Illinois, meanwhile, two dozen Democrats are co-sponsoring a bill that would double the fee for a Firearm Owner ID card, which is required to legally possess a gun in the state, while requiring applicants to subject themselves to fingerprints and imposing background check requirements on the transfers of all firearms, even if both parties possess a valid FOID card.

The Illinois State Police, which oversees the FOID and concealed carry permitting system in the state, is currently facing multiple lawsuits in state and federal court over their inability or unwillingness to process applications in the time allotted to the agency under state law, but rather than scrapping the broken system anti-gun lawmakers are simply doubling down on keeping the FOID cards in place at the expense of the Second Amendment rights of residents.

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Will any of this reduce violent crime? Of course not, but that’s not really the intent. If lawmakers were truly aiming to cut down on acts of violence, they’d be targeting violent criminals. Instead, these efforts are all about reducing the number of legal gun owners and diminishing our Second Amendment rights in the process.

 

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