Ravenwood - 04/13/05 06:45 AM
One of the reasons gun rights advocates hate registration schemes is because it ultimately leads to gun confiscation. If HB2414 passes in Illinois, many semi-automatic rifles and shotguns will be declared illegal and will have to be turned over to the police, without compensation.
The Illinois State Rifle Association notes that the bill would affect nearly 750,000 residents of Illinois, forcing them to either destroy guns worth thousands of dollars or risk a felony conviction.
If passed, HB 2414 would ban the possession of a wide variety of semiautomatic sporting firearms owned by hundreds of thousands of law-abiding Illinois citizens. Under HB 2414, gun owners would have 90 days to surrender their firearms to the police, or face felony prosecution and stiff jail sentences. Any such firearms they surrender would be forfeited without compensation...Given that Illinois already registers"HB 2414 is a clear attempt by some members of the General Assembly to punish law-abiding gun owners," said [ISRA Executive Director Richard Pearson]. "There is no connection between the provisions within HB 2414 and the common street thug.
Criminals are not going to surrender their guns in 90 days, and murderers, robbers and rapists are hardly deterred by HB 2414's threats of Class 3 felony prosecution."
"The state's law-abiding gun owners sent their representatives to Springfield to solve the crime problem -- not make it worse," continued Pearson. "The state's gun owners certainly don't expect their representatives to devise ways to criminalize their sporting activities, and to forcibly strip away their lawfully-acquired private property. The vote on HB 2414 will make it clear to the state's gun owners just who are their friends, and who are not."
Category: Cold Dead Hands
Comments (7) top link me
Thanks for that. I was just recently trying to strengthen my case with someone who was telling me I ought to register my guns.
Posted by: Publius II at April 13, 2005 11:02 AMHmm if this passes, i could pick up some guns at a nice price.
beigna Missouri resident.
on a serious note, this is bull.... damm anti-gun nazis.
Illinois does not register guns. A FOID only marks a person as an individual who can legally buy a gun. It doesn't tell the state how many guns that person actually owns, if any, and it certainly doesn't give the state any way of knowing which of the millions of FOID owners have "assault" weapons.
Posted by: Xrlq at April 14, 2005 3:02 PMTrue, the FOID only registers owners, and not the actual guns themselves. But many localities in Illinois have their own registration programs (a la Chicago).
It also would not surprise me to learn that Illinois had created an illegal registry using the FOID program, cross referenced with purchase records.
Posted by: Ravenwood at April 15, 2005 8:47 AMI think we need a better method of registering and tracking criminals, not guns.
Posted by: Robert Garrard at April 15, 2005 11:28 AMI don't know that "many" localities have registries. Chicago does, but neighboring suburbs, including GFW ones like Evanston and Moron Grove, do not. Plus, "assault" weapons have been banned in Crook County for about a decade now, so the odds of any newly-banned "assault" weapons turning up in Chicago's legal gun registry are next to nil.
Of course, if the StaPo were to start issuing subpoenas to every gun shop to see who bought what when, that would be a different matter. Not sure how the FOID registry would help in that endeavor, though, except to help the StaPo find the individual purchasers the records identify. But driver licenses will do that, too.
Posted by: Xrlq at April 15, 2005 2:57 PMActually, it would be easy to track all of the gun purchases; if not their serial numbers. Anyone who sells anything for a living has a paper trail of who bought what, and for how much; it is called a receipt. Unless you pay cash, your name is associated with that purchase through either a card or a check.
Posted by: Robert Garrard at April 15, 2005 6:29 PM(c) Ravenwood and Associates, 1990 - 2014
