Bad News and Hope in Illinois

Illinois – -(AmmoLand.com)- Illinois is a source of frustration for many Second Amendment supporters, especially those who have to live there. Politically, it has become dominated by Chicago, and many of those who wish to exercise their Second Amendment rights – and who have done so responsibly – find themselves facing more and more onerous legislation.

That legislation is largely pushed by Chicago politicians who are either unable or unwilling to address the high crime rates in their city, and who need to look like they are doing something. Who do they scapegoat? The law-abiding gun owners. Never mind that for nearly three decades, Chicago was a monument to the ineffectiveness of gun control, as despite a handgun ban, the city was one of the most crime-ridden in the country, including staggering homicide totals.

Right now, anti-Second Amendment politicians are ramming through everything. A parliamentary trick was used to keep a bill alive for an anti-Second Amendment governor to sign. That law will make it harder for federally licensed dealers to operate in Illinois.

But it doesn’t stop there. Some of these politicians now want to force those who wish to own firearms to hand over the passwords to their social media accounts to the government so that a history of their searches can be conducted. So, in essence, in order to exercise your Second Amendment rights in Illinois, you have to let some Lois Lerner wannabe look over your posts.

Other bad stuff is on the way – including a special gun tax (never forget that the power to tax a right is the power to destroy a right), an ammunition registry, and a massive gun ban. How far are they going? Put it this way, if your guns are stolen, you get punished for the actions of a criminal.

Unfortunately, the grip that the Chicago machine has on Illinois politics will be very hard to break. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t hope. Illinois is in the Seventh Circuit – and thanks to President Trump, the Circuit is potentially even more Second Amendment-friendly than it was when it struck down the complete ban on carrying firearms for personal protection Illinois had in place.

This could lead to any number of cases heading to the Supreme Court because of a “circuit split” among the appeals courts. The present composition of the Supreme Court seems friendly to Second Amendment rights, and some contenders for a potential vacancy could shift the court in a very pro-Second Amendment direction, and thus make it likely to strike down Bloomberg’s wish list. It would reverse decades of onerous legislation imposed in Illinois and elsewhere.

More importantly, those rulings would cause a good portion of the general public to accept the right to keep and bear arms. This would make it harder to make a case for anti-Second Amendment legislation, and it would clearly place the likes of Bloomberg, Schumer, and Feinstein against the constitution.

Such an outcome, though, would not mean the end of our vigilance. Already, there are plots to pack the court with anti-Second Amendment judges. Furthermore, we could be facing increased social stigmatization, Silicon Valley censorship, and more efforts to enact gun control via corporate boardrooms.

Those would be future battles, and they would be much easier to win given favorable court rulings. Illinois may be a place where we see anti-gun legislation get signed into law, but we could also see it as where we secured the legal precedents to protect our Second Amendment rights.

About Harold Hutchison

Writer Harold Hutchison has more than a dozen years of experience covering military affairs, international events, U.S. politics and Second Amendment issues. Harold was consulting senior editor at Soldier of Fortune magazine and is the author of the novel Strike Group Reagan. He has also written for the Daily Caller, National Review, Patriot Post, Washington Examiner, Strategypage.com, and other national websites.