Gun control dream state: Illinois background checks fail and firearms license revocations are ignored
Later today, the United States House of Representatives will be taking up consideration of two gun control measures. H.R. 8 would impose a so-called “universal” background check gun registration scheme, and H.R. 1112 creates an unworkable system where gun buyers could be placed in an endless loop of background checks and would never actually receive the firearms they wish to purchase.
Viewers of CSPAN, fans of mainstream media talking heads, and readers of newspapers will be inundated with glowing promises of crimes being reduced and active killings being prevented should such bills become law.
As such, today is an excellent day to examine how these laws work in places where they are already in place to one degree or another. Certainly if these bills can accomplish all we are told they will, there should be evidence to back it up, right?
Consider the state of Illinois, where persons wishing to exercise their Second Amendment right even just to own a gun are forced to apply for a "firearms owner's identification card" (i.e. gun registration). Surely a law like that must have created utopia for residents in the Land of Lincoln, right?
From the Associated Press:
An initial background check five years ago failed to flag an out-of-state felony conviction that would have prevented a man from buying the gun he used to kill five co-workers and wound six other people, including five responding police officers, at a suburban Chicago manufacturing plant, authorities say.
Gary Martin, who was killed in a shootout with officers Friday, ending his deadly rampage at the Henry Pratt Co. in Aurora, was issued a firearm owner’s identification card in January 2014 after a background check failed to show a 1995 aggravated assault conviction in Mississippi, Aurora police Chief Kristen Ziman said Saturday.
He bought the Smith and Wesson handgun he used in Friday’s attack two months later, on March 11, 2014, she said. Five days after that, he applied for a concealed carry permit, which included a more rigorous background check that used digital fingerprinting and that did flag his Mississippi felony conviction, which led the Illinois State Police to revoke his permit.
While it shouldn't be surprising (to those with any common sense that is) that a criminal like Martin would ignore the law, it will likely come as a shock that these ignored notices are clearly not being prosecuted - at least not all of them.
Indeed, Martin was able to keep his gun despite losing his permit, because the government failed to enforce its own gun control law - one that they no doubt promises would prevent this sort of thing from happening when they advocated for its passage.
It gets worse. According to the AP, police say that of the people who received gun license revocations last year in Illinois, more than 75 percent ignored the notices. Because the AP apparently didn't ask, readers are left to imagine how few of those criminals are actually pursued by authorities to actually surrender their firearms.
Similar "evidence" of how gun control laws like the ones being debated today in Washington D.C. work can be found in California, a state that has suffered attacks at Borderline Bar in Thousand Oaks, the YouTube headquarters, and terrorist attacks in San Bernadino and Fresno, to name but a few.
Or perhaps we should consider an even more restrictive place when it comes to private gun ownership - a place that has ever possible gun control law the extremists wish could be made into law here - Russia. Surely there we'll find evidence that these laws have fulfilled the promise of ending these attacks, right?
Wrong.
On Wednesday, October 18, an 18 year-old college student entered Kerch Polytechnic College in the city of Kerch (located in Russia-controlled Crimea) and began firing on fellow students and instructors.
When his attack was done 15 minutes later, at least 20 people were dead and 70 others wounded. The attacker then took his own life.
The American news media failed to give wall-to-wall coverage on this attack, but it deserved the attention of the American public. Why? Because every law that gun control advocates claim will stop these attacks here in America is already in place in Russia, and the terrible results speak for themselves.
When the objective person considers the "evidence" from places where these types of gun control laws are already in place, they will be see the promises being spewed on the House floor today for what they really are - lies.
Chad D. Baus is the Buckeye Firearms Association Secretary and an NRA-certified firearms instructor. He is co-founder of BFA-PAC, and served as its Vice Chairman for 15 years. He is the editor of BuckeyeFirearms.org, which received the Outdoor Writers of Ohio 2013 Supporting Member Award for Best Website.
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