Illinois wants gun owners there to register certain weapons. While there have been legal challenges, the dust hasn’t fully settled and the current status quo is that the registration will go into effect.
That’s the bad news for us.
For the state, though, there’s a different kind of bad news.
You see, they want people to register things like “assault weapons” and they expected people to trip over themselves to comply. Yet, as the deadline looms, that doesn’t seem to be happening.
Sure, more people are registering them now than in previous weeks–deadlines are like that–but there’s reason to believe it’ll be only a fraction of the total number in Illinois.
The so-called Protect Illinois Communities Act demanded existing owners of particularly frightening firearms register their magazine-fed, semi-automatic rifles. These include guns best-suited to self-defense including America’s favorite rifle, the AR-15. The law also bans many semi-auto shotguns and handguns. Then there are the accessories and .50 BMG ammunition that must be registered as well.
With a December 31 deadline fast approaching, the Illinois State Police released their Week 11 compliance update on Wednesday and it’s a doozy. While thousands of Illinois gun owners have dutifully complied, millions have not. Holders of 15,164 Firearms Owner ID cardholders have registered an average of about 3.5 covered items each.
Put another way, 2,400,317 FOID holders have registered…nothing. Running that through some public school math, that yields a 99.4% non-compliance rate.
Now, a lot of those 2.4 million FOID holders don’t have anything to register. They own firearms that don’t require registration.
Plus, in theory, there are some FOID holders who don’t even own guns. Maybe they got their FOID to get a firearm, then never got around to it. I’m sure there are a few like that in Illinois.
But I’m quite sure there are more than 15,164 “assault weapon” owners in the state, too. A whole lot more, and they’re not registering a thing.
This looks to be about like what we saw in New York after they passed their SAFE Act. That required registration of existing modern sporting rifles and most people just said, “Nah.”
After all, most gun owners figure that gun registration leads to gun confiscation. According to Guns Save Life, they probably should figure that.
So what is next? Following a mass-casualty incident, especially if it happens in the Land of Lincoln, the Governor will announce a plan to “close the existing owner loophole.” Their words, not ours.
Governor Pritzker will back legislation to call for those who have registered guns and accessories to surrender those registered items to the police after 90 days or so. Failure to do so would result in felony charges.
By mandating the surrender of those registered items, they can determine who has complied and who has not. Those who have not can expect ISP-led “firearm compliance teams” to knock on their doors.
There’s no link as to where “their words” originated, so I can’t evaluate that one way or another, but it’s also the kind of thing I wouldn’t put past Pritzker or any other gun grabber.
They know registration isn’t going to stop people from having these guns and they know someone determined to commit some kind of atrocity will find a way to do so. The idea that they’d then use such an event to pass confiscation legislation isn’t overly shocking.
But without some indication of just where it originates from, I can’t say definitively that this is the plan in Illinois.
What we do know is that there’s absolutely no chance all of those guns get registered by the deadline. Instead, all registration has done is given good, decent folks an excuse to go outlaw.
I can’t say that I blame them.
