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On Friday 1/31/20, a lawsuit was filed in which the Illinois State Police is being sued for not processing FOID cards in a timely manner, leading to legal issues for citizens.
As discussed before, Mom-At-Arms broke this story on 12/2/19 and blah blah blah. The ISRA was working on it in the background, in which they released their info on 12/10 after our release started to spread thanks to getting picked up and sourced in the Truth About Guns and also by the gun rights organization, Guns Save Life.
While we do not know what they initially were going to do with the info they had, it’s a lawsuit now, so GOOD. That brings us to another issue: accountability.
In 2017, Illinois legislators were working on a fund sweep bill that ended up going nowhere. However, there was an amendment to that bill:
That amendment is located here.
And there’s the amount set aside for a sweep from the fund from this amendment:
That brings us to the 2018 budget (State Finance Act).
Check it out:
Confirmed by the ISRA’s official findings released on 12/10/19:
So, let’s look at one of the main co-sponsors of the dead bill in which an amendment to it became part of the 2018 State Finance Act: Rep. Kathleen Willis.
Rep Willis is the “brain” behind SB1966 (which became the main bill that is now the Fix the FOID Act). Willis was attached to the bill that became part of the sweeping in 2017 that was worked into the 2018 budget, yet she’s saying gun owners need to pay more for FOID cards in which more money goes into the fund that gets swept for other purposes.
Also, Willis had this to say as she testified at the Illinois House Judiciary Committee hearing regarding SB1966:
Willis said the purpose of the bill is to “keep up” with FOID revocations and create better communication between local and state law enforcement agencies.
“One of the reasons that we saw that revocations were not followed up as best as they could was because there was no money in resources to be able to do that,” Willis said.
State Police Lt. John Thompson testified Tuesday about the challenges his agency faces with the limited funds it receives for FOID revocation enforcement.
He said the fee of $10 for 10 years isn’t enough to sustain the nearly 1,000 applications the department receives daily.
“We’re running a very, very basic operation, and it’s not what’s expected of us and we need to do better,” Thompson said.
Willis also states in a more recent PBS interview that the purpose is more (unneeded) funding.
Start video at the point noted here:
Also, listen here between these time markers:
Point here is can legislators be held accountable for stuff like this and then trying to pass the bill off on innocent legal gun owners? At the very least it shows that these legislators know that they are possibly creating problems that led to incidents that caused them to introduce garbage draconian bills like SB1966. Was it there intent? No. But their actions have consequences and it shouldn’t be up to the legal Illinois gun owner to literally pay for it.