Sangamon County Rifle Association
Right Reason on Second Amendment Rights
Springfield, Illinois


Jim Butler




Time for the FOID Card to Go

Jim Butler, President, SCRA
April 2011 GunNews







Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan has released an opinion recently telling the Illinois State Police to release the names of those having Firearms Owner's Identifications cards.

The FOID is managed by the Illinois State Police, which runs back ground background checks on applicants.  These FOID records have always been available to law enforcement officers working cases, but not to reporters.

Releasing this information would create a burglar's paradise.  They would be able to pinpoint homes to break into and steal valuable firearms.  This could lead to many confrontations where the home owner could be injured or killed.

Madigan said only the names would be released, but in these days when every bit of fact, factoid, outright lies, gossip and/or truthfulness on a person can be had with a few computer key strokes, privacy is becoming the secular holy ground.

How many key strokes would it take to come up with your address if you are a gun owner?

On the other hand burglars could use the information on the list to pick out those homes known to be unarmed and can safely be burglarized by them.

Anti-gun political groups would have the opportunity to harass and apply pressure on gun owners at their homes and businesses.

The Illinois FOID card is nothing but a backdoor registration scheme by the anti-self-defense movement to take away our right to keep and bear arms.  While not actually registering each gun it does register every legal gun owner, while felons are constitutionally exempt from the registration requirement as forcing them to register firearms would violate the Fifth Amendment provision against self-incrimination.

Only law-abiding citizens are required to comply with registration - people who have never committed a crime nor have any intention of doing so.

Registration of Illinois gun owners has created yet another expensive bureaucracy the state can ill afford with no tangible anti-crime return.  It has no effect on crime as criminals by definition do not obey laws and only affects law-abiding citizens; criminals will always be able to get guns.

It has diverted state law enforcement from its responsibility of apprehending and arresting criminals, to investigating and processing paperwork on law-abiding citizens.

Finally, this backdoor gun owners registration scheme violates an individual's right to privacy protected by the Fourth Amendment and establishes a basis from which gun confiscation could be implemented.

Reasonable fears of such confiscation leads otherwise law-abiding citizens to ignore such laws, creating a disrespect for law and a lessened support for authorities.

A better use of this FOID bureaucracy would be to change it to one that issues "shall issue" concealed carry permits to qualified gun owners.  This would also bring in badly needed revenue to the state.  Illinois is the only state that doesn't have some sort of a right to carry.  Wisconsin has open carry and in a recent case a Milwaukee judge has ruled that Wisconsin's ban on concealed weapons is unconstitutional as it applies to a contractor who was victimized by a robbery.

Time for this gun owner registration scheme to be tossed into the dust bin of history along with Chicago's unconstitutional
handgun ban.


Commentaries by Jim Butler

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