Illinois was the last state in the country to adopt a concealed carry law, and it did so only to avoid a Supreme Court review of its complete and total ban on bearing arms in public. Rather than risk a precedent setting decision from SCOTUS after the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals found the state's ban a violation of the Second Amendment in 2012, Democrats (with the urging of the gun control lobby) took the loss and adopted a pretty stringent "shall issue" licensing law.
Over the past decade, the number of licensed concealed carry holders in Illinois has grown to more than 500,000; a number the editorial board of the Chicago Sun-Times finds unacceptably high. The paper's editors say too many applicants with "sketchy" backgrounds are being approved for their CCL, even after sheriffs reject applicants for supposedly being too much of a risk to exercise their Second Amendment rights.
The seven-member Concealed Carry Licensing Review Board decides whether to uphold or reject a sheriff’s objection to a concealed-carry application. The review board can reject a concealed carry application if a preponderance of the evidence shows the applicant is a danger to themselves or the public. The review board also is supposed to provide a letter to a sheriff in each case, telling how an objection has been resolved, but it does not always do so.
Here is the startling number: In suburban Cook County — in cases in which the review board sent a letter — 85% of applicants have received concealed carry licenses since 2020 even though Sheriff Tom Dart’s office filed objections. Yes, 85%.
Such a high number of overruled objections obviously raises a lot of red flags.
As for the letters, the non-response rate to Dart’s office was 26% in 2023, and it has been trending upward in recent years. In 2018, it was only 3%.
Maybe the "red flag" is the number of objections that Dart has filed, rather than the number of applications that are approved. If 85% of rejected applicants are winning their appeals, I'd say that's pretty strong evidence that Dart is abusing his authority in blocking Cook County residents from exercising their right to carry.
On average, the Cook County sheriff’s office submitted about 1,400 objections every year between 2014 and 2023. (That includes only suburban Cook County, not Chicago.) Yet consider this for comparison’s sake: From Jan. 1 to Sept. 1, the review board reported 487 application denials for the entire state.
Records show 60 instances between 2017 and 2023 when an applicant who was awarded a concealed carry license was booked into Cook County Jail within 180 days of the time when Dart filed an objection for a charge of domestic battery or violation of an order of protection. Although someone booked into a jail has not been convicted, it’s not exactly a testament to that person’s likelihood of handling firearms in a responsible manner.
Neither Cook County nor the state of Illinois publishes data on how many active CCL holders are in the county, so the latest figure I could find is from 2016, when a now-defunct website called Reboot Illinois reported there were 47,000 active concealed carry licenses in Cook County. My guess is that the number is significantly higher now than it was eight years ago, but even using the 2016 figure we're talking about less than 1/10th of 1% of license holders being arrested for a charge of domestic battery or a violation of an order of protection. In fact, if Dart is filing 1,400 objections per year on average, the 60 individuals arrested between 2017 and 2023 represent less than 1% of the total number of applicants who were the subject of the sheriff's objections.
That's hardly evidence of a major problem with Illinois's carry laws, but the Sun-Times editorial board is adamant that something must be done.
Gun violence is a multifaceted problem, and no single step will make every street and community instantly safe. But the path to saving lives and reducing injuries is to keep identifying ways to keep guns out of the hands of people who shouldn’t have them.
Concealed carry is unlikely to go away anytime soon in Illinois because it essentially was imposed by a federal court. But the least the system could do to protect the public is to ensure that those who have the permits aren’t likely to engage in criminal or other behavior that puts themselves or others at risk.
If fewer than 1% of concealed carry holders are ever arrested for a crime, I'd say that's evidence that the current system is working. There are tens of thousands of DUI arrests in Illinois every year. Does that suggest that the state is failing to properly screen applicants for a driver's license, or that the state needs to take action to give sheriffs unfettered authority to deny someone a license to get behind the wheel?
With its jibe towards the "court-imposed" carry law (which was really the result of the state refusing to defend its carry prohibition at the Supreme Court), the Sun-Times editorial board has made it clear it has a problem with concealed carry in general. What they haven't demonstrated is whether allowing sheriffs like Dart the authority to deny someone a carry license because he thinks their background is too "sketchy" would comport with the Supreme Court's decision in Bruen or simply violate their fundamental civil rights.
