After the first week of Illinois’ gun registry, things weren’t looking so good. Compliance rates were ridiculously low.
That’s hardly surprising. Gun registration is one of those areas where few are interested in becoming an early adopter, especially since there’s a chance this will be thrown out by the courts at some point in time. Why register guns if you don’t have to?
But surely week two would look a bit better, right?
Well, you’d think that, but it sure doesn’t look to be the case.
In the second week of Illinois’ gun ban registry, of more than 2.4 million Firearm Owner ID card holders, a total of 1,618 have disclosed they own an item banned by the state. A legislator says the registry needs to be put on hold.
Numbers Illinois State Police published for the first week of the registry that opened Oct. 1 showed 1,050 individuals disclosing a total of 3,202 now banned items. For the second week, an additional 568 have filed for a total of 4,678 items, 3,053 of which were banned firearms.
With a total of 1,618 individuals complying two weeks in, that would be about 0.07% of the 2.4 million FOID card holders in the state.
The first week’s numbers showed 1,125 disclosures of .50 caliber ammunition registrations and only 17 reported accessory disclosures. The second week’s numbers had the totals for ammo at 31 and accessories at 1,594.
“On the initial report, the accessory and ammunition numbers were flipped,” a spokesperson for ISP told The Center Square. “Once we identified the error, we corrected it.”
Those with banned firearms not registered by Jan. 1, 2024, could face criminal penalties of a Class A misdemeanor for the first offense and a Class 3 felony for subsequent offenses.
So what this means is that there’s still plenty of time for people to get their guns registered in Illinois, though I still suspect few people will bother.
There are two camps of people we’re looking at. The first don’t realize they need to register anything. They have a gun that they bought lawfully but they don’t follow the news and so they’re unaware this is happening.
The second are those who know but aren’t registering jack squat. These are more likely to be your gun rights advocates who know what they’re doing, or at least believe they do.
From the standpoint of the state of Illinois, the difference doesn’t matter.
What does matter, though, is how many of the remaining number will seek to register their weapons before the January 1st deadline.
I don’t expect it to be all that many, though.
We saw New York go through this with their SAFE Act and remarkably few people registered their guns. Some might have been unaware of the registration right through to the deadline, but I suspect most knew about it and just decided the state had no business knowing what guns they have or don’t have.
Currently, Illinois is shaping up for the same kind of disappointment and, frankly, I find it amusing.
The truth of the matter is that while Illinois has issues, mostly in Chicago, these “banned” guns aren’t the real problem. The problem is and has always been that there are a large number of people in the area who have no respect for human life.
The odds of them registering guns are even smaller, especially since they generally don’t buy firearms lawfully, especially in Illinois.
Gun registrations only work if people comply and I happen to be tickled to see so few playing along as things currently stand. Our rights shouldn’t be held hostage by a government that thinks it has a right to know what you have at home.
