"The gun show loophole" Illinois may have de-facto registration  Phil Davis SCRA meeting 8/1/05 September 2005 GunNews Phil Davis talked about the bill closing the gun show loophole.  The bill is supposed to regulate "unlicensed firearms dealers".  Davis says the wording is an oxymoron, kind of like saying "military intelligence", "kind of pregnant" or "jumbo shrimp".  It simply doesn't exist.  You are either a dealer or you are a private individual. Davis explained that a dealer by definition is licensed by the federal government, they must have ATF's background checks and approvals.  They come in and check you whenever they feel like it and you'd better have your records straight and you must not have a single typographical error.  A single typographical error is enough for a sanction or an injunction.  Two or three errors is enough for major retraining and five is enough to lose your license.  Typographical errors can mean things like not putting a zero in front of the six on 06 on a date,  putting a Y for a Yes, putting US instead of USA, or misspelling Sangamon on a 4473 form.  Davis said he knows this is true because at the shop where Davis works, they spent three days going through over eleven-thousand 4473 forms and found three typographical errors. This gun show loophole says that any individuals selling guns at a gun show must call the insta- check system the same as a dealer would, and wait the required one day for a long gun and three days for a handgun.  Davis said he was concerned that they weren't going to set up a mechanism to allow people to get into the NIC system.  They had, as of Monday morning, the day after the governor signed the bill,  Davis' boss called up for his first gun approval.  Davis heard his boss say "what the @#*'s this?" They had changed the message already. "If you are an FFL dealer, press 1.  If you are a private individual, press 2." Davis said his boss has called the state police and their FOID bureau trying to get a definition of what a gun show is. Technically, Davis says if he were to walk up to another SCRA member to show him a 1911 .45 and offered to sell it to him, that is two or more people joined together for the express purpose of showing an/or selling firearms.  Davis said that if he had brought a gun in to the meeting, this could be a gun show because he would be showing members a gun.  If someone wanted to buy that gun Davis would have to borrow a cell phone, try to remember the 866 or whatever the number is, and pay $2.12 for the call to get an approval code. Davis says the seller has to put in his FOID card number and then put in the buyers FOID card number.  This combined with the bill that was vetoed allowing them to keep all records makes a defacto data base of all private sellers and all private buyers of firearms in the State of Illinois. Davis urged everyone to be very, very careful.  He said the genie is out of the bottle and we need to get rid of the "gun show loophole" provision because it is bogus, and there is no such thing as a unlicensed dealer.  If you have a FOID card that is valid you have already passed the background check in the State of Illinois. So they have this mechanism in place where you are automatically putting in your FOID card number.  Davis said a troubling thought crossed his mind so he mentioned it to his boss who got a funny look on his face like "oh *#@+, you're right."  What if you just found out what someone's FOID card number was?  That's all the machine cares about.  You can act like you're selling a million guns to somebody else.  There's no check on that.  Its nothing more than a data base they're putting together on who's buying and who's selling guns.  Davis said  the fact that Blagojevich vetoed the get rid of that records provision right around the same time as the passing of the gun show bill takes all the question out of Davis' mind about what Blagojevich is trying to do.  He is getting defacto if not legal registration of firearms in the State of Illinois. More from Phil Davis  Return to SCRA Home Page