If you’re a gun owner in Illinois, don’t put your FOID card behind your driver’s license. Bonus: Highland Park Mass Shooting

If you’re a gun owner in Illinois, don’t put your FOID card behind your driver’s license.

I recently had an exchange of emails with Richard Stallman over the absurdity of gun control laws.

Some issues came up where I poked truck-sized holes in his arguments in favor of gun control, which obviously none of that has been working in Chicago, but aside from this I mentioned who the police are actually harassing in Illinois. Legal gun owners who have a FOID card.

Like that Navy veteran who started carrying.

He had a FOID card but not an active CCL. He previously had a CCL, but he said it cost too much to keep renewing, so he just kept the guns in his house and had a FOID card.

Then he had to do UberEats because of the shitty economy, and he kept getting approached and harassed by Chicago street criminals.

So he started carrying again with a FOID but no CCL.

When he got pulled over for a minor traffic issue, he pulled out his driver’s license.

His FOID was behind the license.

The cop saw the FOID and asked if he had a gun in the car.

He told the cop yes, and then the cop charged him with a felony for not having the CCL.

His life was ruined and he now has a felony record even though he was never going to harm anyone.

The state of Illinois took an honorably discharged Navy veteran who was dismayed by the crime and the 2 hour and 6 minute average police response time in his Chicago neighborhood, and tried to protect himself, and made him totally unemployable, using a law meant to go after “dangerous criminals”, or so we are told.

When I read that, I moved the FOID card out from behind my driver’s license and put it behind my health insurance card instead.

I said, “That’s a good point. If the cop sees your FOID during a traffic stop, they might pull what they did with this poor fellow.”.

And who needs more police harassment over exercising a civil right which is theoretically guaranteed by our nation’s highest law?

People like Richard Stallman have placed entirely too much trust into institutions that have shown repeatedly that they don’t deserve it and either won’t fix anything or are designed to actively resist fixing things.

Instead of simplistically suggesting that a ban on guns will solve violent crime, what they should be saying is that most crime springs from giving people nothing to lose and all day standing around to get angrier about it, like mass poverty and unemployment.

Capitalism wants unemployment. Can’t exist without it.

When the government says it wants full employment, what it really means is it wants a minimum of five percent unemployment. Minimum. If there aren’t enough where you came from, you might demand to be paid more for your labor.

Going back to angry young men, the mass shooting this morning at the July 4th parade in Highland Park, Illinois is another example of why there’s nothing to celebrate in a country that turns its back on citizens, rules from the alleged Supreme Court that women are a uterus with legs, and proposes additional taxes on people without kids (which was an actual policy in the Soviet Union of all places), and leaves everyone to fend for themselves. Not just with unemployment and poverty, but when you get cancer or something.

The two dozen people who survived will start getting a parade…..of hospital bills easily hitting hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars. Happy ‘Murrica Day!

Being shot and killed or left with millions in hospital bills trying to celebrate a country that threw them overboard thirty years ago is a sad thing indeed.

About as ironic is the Mexican family next door that Trump and his racist thugs that voted for him were trying to get rid of just 18 months ago shooting off fireworks all last night.

You can’t go anywhere these days without being shot at or something, in a state with the toughest gun laws in America.

The police came out after it was too late, to stand around for photo ops in their body armor with their machine guns, just like Uvalde.

To go along with this shit show where the police are locking down a majority White and wealthy Chicago suburb and going door to door and shutting down the Metra, is when at least this much happens in Chicago every single day, and nothing happens….no lockdowns, no manhunts….no Biden….no feds.

The police show up and count the shell casings each time in Chicago and then the news says “We’ll report on it in one run when there’s sixty bodies total at the end of the weekend.”.

This is mostly because they’re not wealthy and White down there like they are in Highland Park, so nobody makes a big stink about it in Chicago.

Even my mom said, “There are kids being shot in Highland Park!”.

I said, “There’s kids being hit in the head by stray bullets while doing their homework in Chicago!”.

This is what happens. This media circus about White people getting shot in Highland Park made the national news and got a direct response from Biden, and will go on and on for weeks, and the police are working it because they can’t just wring their hands since it was White people face down on the sidewalk.

I have also noticed that a similar phenomenon happens when people go missing. It’s a country of over 300 million people. Lots go missing all the time.

The media circus and phone alerts (which I finally got annoyed enough about to turn off) happens when they’re White and a woman, leading to me sneering about it on the news Web sites as “Oh great, another Missing White Woman Alert.”.

It’s not that people in the US don’t care, it’s that we’re burned out. We have to endure so many ignorant people putting so many ignorant politicians in office, that don’t want to be seen doing nothing, so they do the wrong thing (Democrats), or don’t want to lift people out of poverty either because they don’t want to spend the money (Republicans) or because they spend the money creating poverty traps in order to get voters (Democrats). In the end, it really is the same thing, isn’t it?

I noted the other day on TechRights that the more you fight to get ahead in this country, the more they suck you back down into the gutter. You go to college to earn more money, and many people end up paying more in loans than the difference between some low wage job and their new career. You pick up hours, you lose your health insurance subsidy from the government. You get a little more money this month, there went the help with your food and light bill. You have savings? That just means you get inflation and garnishment creditors and lost that.

It’s horrible. And I’ve tried to point that out, but the problem is that most people you can point it out to stepped into it themselves and can’t get back out and don’t want anyone reminding them of the problems they’re facing, so things go on pretty much unchanged.