In the US, the Second Amendment provides that American citizens and Lawful Permanent Residents have the right to bear arms, as do most state constitutions, including the one of the state of Illinois.
None of them hint that it would be lawful to restrict this right in any manner, but the federal courts have upheld that the federal and state governments have the right to bar people who are convicted felons or are subject to a restraining order.
Unfortunately, getting a restraining order is comically simple in the United States. In fact, a woman in New Mexico was able to get one against David Letterman in 2005 (CNN deleted the original story, but it’s at the Internet Archive) because she believed that he was sending her coded messages through her television set.
Instead of ordering the woman to undergo a mental health evaluation, the judge decided that, under the federal “Violence Against Women Act” (which some studies have shown to have increased violence against women, which would not be unprecedented given the results of the Wars on Drugs and Terrorists, and which gives people perverse incentives to make false accusations of domestic violence that ruin other people’s lives in exchange for government benefits), David Letterman couldn’t own a firearm until the restraining order ended.
What’s wrong with this picture?
Restraining orders are not hard to get. In fact, courts issue millions of them every year. The majority are against men, and usually as a matter of process (“justice as an assembly line”) rather than a decision made by a judge that is grounded in the facts of the case. Divorce lawyers, perhaps the most unscrupulous type, hit men with them strategically while they help their cheating ex-wives (or husbands, it’s the future!) strip them of their assets and run off with their children.
In fact, that’s where we get to the meat of our story.
My ex didn’t even ask the court for one in 2019. He brought someone into our home by surprise to openly cheat on me with, in front of me, and when I complained about it, they called the police and fabricated a story about me threatening them with a knife.
In fact, I had a 2 inch fishing knife because we lived on a house with a pier and I had been fishing from it earlier. The police charged me with two counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and hauled me off to the booking station.
In fact, they didn’t even tell me that they were pressing the second charge, which was against my ex. The cops at the station gave up trying to get me to talk to them and cut me loose and told me to go home, with my ex. They had the authority to order me not to go home or anywhere near him as a condition of the individual bond, but they didn’t do that. The shifty bastards just chose to not inform me about the second charge until I ended up in arraignment court the next month.
Well, obviously things did not go well when I got back home. In fact, my mother was terrified. She took 3 weeks off work and came to stay with me and during that three weeks, my ex would taunt me that if he felt like it, he would just lie to the police again and “have them take [me] away”, because “Who are they going to believe? You’re already on bail.”.
So I picked a day where he would be at work, moved out everything I could, and lived in a motel, for the next two years. In the American system, if you go to court, you’ll almost always be convicted (because fair), so almost everyone takes a plea bargain.
In fact, the state settled with me for Disorderly Conduct as a Class C Misdemeanor, but went ahead and made no contact with the “victims” a condition of probation, which automatically took away my right to own a firearm or a FOID card.
Whether you believe me or not is, frankly, irrelevant. What follows, however, is relevant.
The FOID system in Illinois is a complete mess.
Under the 1968 law, which only the state of Illinois has, you must have one to do all the things most Americans can do with a gun without any sort of permit from the state. The state has not only currently disenfranchised over 34,000 Illinoisans, most of them after some sort of show trial, plea bargain, or ridiculous restraining order which anyone can be slapped with, but it doesn’t know what happened to the cards or the guns in up to 80% of the cases, according to the Chicago Tribune.
To get a FOID card, the Illinois State Police subject you to a background check, which uses NICS, and they additionally check to see if your psychiatrist has narced on you for being a “threat to self or others”, with whatever that means being at the sole discretion of the psychiatrist and taking place entirely outside a court on something more like a “No Fly List” (violation of due process), or if you have voluntarily admitted yourself into a mental health treatment facility in the past 5 years for any reason.
In addition to being overly broad and giving doctors every reason to report to err on the side of not losing their license, it disincentivizes individuals to seek mental help. Possibly sending them over the edge with a loaded gun instead of talking out their problems or seeking medical help. But lawfakers almost never consider the real world implications of their laws.
In fact, they say they want to remove stigma of mental illness, or at least Democrats do, but then they further stigmatize it, when research shows that almost no mass shooters are actually mentally ill in the sense of anything covered by the DSM.
(Democrats have also blamed video games, music, and everything else, and have attempted to gut the First Amendment accordingly. Idiots looking for easy solutions and assholes who want to take away all of your rights.)
In fact, it’s often just some toxic man who can’t get anyone to have sex with him. Which is not in the DSM. Should the DSM be updated? I think it should be, but that doesn’t change the facts. And why should it affect anyone else? On top of that, before many mass shootings, the people around the shooter frantically tried to get the attention of the police, to no avail, even in states with Red Flag Laws, which are worse than FOID because they violate several more amendments to the Bill of Rights at the same time.
So, essentially, what these laws mean is that all of society has to give up their constitutional rights because of some idiot who can’t vent by beating off to internet porn that the police were warned of and chose not to do anything about.
And, on the subject of suicides, the gun laws have no effect overall. People in countries with the strictest gun laws who want to do it will jump in front of a train. Perhaps the Democrats in Illinois should outlaw Metra instead of just leaning on the news to quit reporting people leaping onto the tracks. After all, the problem has been on the rise in Illinois for years, and even Metra’s own CEO jumped in front of one to beat an arrest for embezzling from the agency. Just outlaw trains, or maybe force everyone to get clearance to be within 1,000 feet of one from the state police, by making them ask for a “Train Pass Owner ID Card” that can be at the whim of the state. I’m sure the problem will go away immediately, because Democrats.
The fact is, if people want to do something, they’ll find a way to get it done.
When criminal thugs in Chicago want guns, they don’t walk into a gun shop and tell the law abiding gun shop owner “Here’s my FOID card, all hail Jabba the Pritzker!”, they just buy a trunk load from out of state, illegally. Or they rob a train car full of M16 assault rifles heading to a military armory (fully automatic, at that, which are also banned by law for civilian possession, as is train robbery…as well as flak jackets and grenade launchers). Criminals breaking the law? Nooooooo! That’s absurd. More so than the notion that they’re better armed than the Colonial Marines who went to LV-426 in the movie Aliens. 🙂
Since the passage of the FOID Act, over 250,000 Illinoisans have been shot and over 70,000 have been killed.
Which are statistics that make the state sound more like the Vietnam War than a Democrat success, right?
So when you lose your right to a FOID card, what’s it like?
Personal experience: The Illinois State Police are so backlogged and incompetent that it took them from August 2019, when the order was handed down by the judge, to January 2020, to invalidate my FOID card and ask for it back under penalty of a new misdemeanor.
So wait, you’re saying you had an active FOID card for five months from the order and 8 months from the arrest?
Not exactly. I surrendered it voluntarily to my probation officer and the Illinois State Police got a surrender form that had been filled out by her and lost it. Then they left the card file active and then demanded a card that I no longer had. Had I just not told the probation officer about the card, that’s exactly what _could_ have happened though. The probation officer I got stuck with was such a lefty moron that she actually said “I’ll need the card. you can’t buy a gun without the card.”. I wryly replied, “Must explain Chicago, then.”.
So it sounds like if the people being subjected to these orders really are dangerous, then the Illinois State Police could be leaving them with the ability to buy a gun and do whatever they’re going to do with it for quite some time?
Bingo. And the real kicker is that by August of 2020, the court order expired and I was eligible for a FOID card again.
So did you ever get the card back?
Yes, I did! In fact, in addition to the state violating its own laws about processing time for FOID cards (the law gives them 30 days, but if you call the 800 number now they admit it’s more like 90), they also violate the law on timeline for appeals. Some are taking 3 years. Mine took 6 months.
So wait, the FOID Act says if you committed a violent crime you can’t get it back!
No it doesn’t. It says if you were convicted of one, you can’t get it back. Disorderly Conduct isn’t “violent” and I took court supervision, so I was not convicted of anything.
Well gee, that sounds like a really dumb law then.
It is. And the Democrats are trying to make it even worse. It’s already been struck down a couple of times, but the Illinois Supreme Court is using stall tactics to avoid having to make a permanent ruling, because they know they’ll lose when it goes to the US Supreme Court. The Illinois State Rifle Association (not the NRA) has come to the defense of citizens against a vicious attack on our rights by the Illinois legislature and unaccountable and unelected bureaucrats in the Illinois State Police against a senseless law that emboldens armed career criminals by disarming their prey.
How are the Democrats trying to make it worse?
Aside from doubling the fee to use a constitutional right, which is at the whim of the State Police already, several Democrats in the legislature are trying to add steps to the process, including having the State Police force you to turn over your “Social Media” handles so that they can read them, and decide if they like what they’re reading or not before they make a decision on your FOID card application.
When constitutional rights depend on what you say on Facebook….. These are truly scary times. Philip K. Dick could have written a new book and it wouldn’t have been any more out there than what the Democrats have been up to in Illinois. Supporting Burn, Loot, and Murder, paroling child molesters and serial killers, and trying to pass a trailer bill like this to the FOID Act.
Maybe millions of Illinoisans will be creeped out by the government using their Facebook for something like this, but then, Bruce Schneier said that when it’s a choice between security and dancing pigs, users will choose dancing pigs every time. Facebook has been getting more toxic and less tolerant of free speech anyway, and has been banning people randomly and losing users, but doesn’t seem to care. They buy up most up and coming social media to make sure that when you leave them, you resurface somewhere else where it’s easy to be stalked and to keep tabs on you.
The folks of Illinois should take a look at what the politicians are up to. They should take a good, long, look.
Outside the scope of this article, many Illinois communities are now entirely out of money and can’t afford to run any local government operations at all because the state promised such generous pensions. The city of Harvey recently triggered a law that has the state intercept its share of various taxes to pay out pensions, and as a result had to lay off pretty much all of the remaining police and fire departments, Chicago complains of it too, and Peoria is probably next. But they won’t be the last. It’s no wonder that the state is emptying out of everyone who goes to work, pays their taxes, follows the law, and expects the state to keep them safe. It increasingly leaves criminals and ignorant hipsters and SJWs who support the criminals as the voting base. When these people vote, you get laws that make it difficult for you to protect your family from being raped and stolen from by people who come to burn down your house and business down.
It happened in Kenosha, Wisconsin where they have stronger gun rights protections than we do in Illinois, and if you give it time, perhaps only months, it could happen to you too.
BLM is really just a bunch of “Jimmy in-n-outs” as Saul Goodman (the lawyer from Breaking Bad) put it. They’re really angry and bitter that they have to do stints in prison between felonies and that every time the state lets them out to commit more crime, they go right back to the slammer. It’s a political movement in the sense that they want to confiscate your belongings using the state this time, as the state is sovereign and thus can’t do anything illegal. Maybe they are smarter than anyone thinks.
I believe that making the state so horrible that “Decent people should live somewhere else. They’ll like it better.” (As Jack Nicholson’s Joker put it.) is their end goal so that they have permanent run of the place.
“Just when those American citizens needed their rights the most, the government TOOK ‘EM AWAY. And rights aren’t rights if someone can TAKE ‘EM AWAY!” -George Carlin
The “media” barely (but sometimes, opaquely) reports on it, but the citizens of Illinois are increasingly discovering the Second Amendment. Illinois is now #1 in the nation for legal gun sales, with the State Police drowning in FOID card applications.
I just don’t understand, and maybe some of my fellow citizens can explain this to my satisfaction.
Why are you voting for Democrats to unleash child pornographers, rapists, murderers, and crackheads to live in your neighborhood, while making it harder to defend yourself from them, while defunding and hamstringing the police with a bill written by the “Black Caucus” that was passed in the middle of the night with no debate, and then buying a gun?
Do you see the irony?
Also, where did “GUN BAD ERGGGH! GUN BAD!” go?
Does that only apply to other folks and not the individual liberal itself?
Enquiring minds want to know.
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