Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker's attitudes on guns reflect not the general consensus throughout the state, but mostly the thoughts of people in Chicago. That's the problem with large cities having an oversized influence over a state's politics.
And, unsurprisingly, he signed a couple of gun control measures into law.
With gun violence still a persistent problem despite recent drops in Chicago, Gov. JB Pritzker signed a pair of gun control efforts into law Monday — one that requires Illinoisans to more quickly report lost firearms and another mandating law enforcement agencies statewide participate in a federal gun tracing platform.
The two modest measures are the latest additions to the suite of gun control laws enacted under Pritzker’s watch, including a sweeping ban on high-powered firearms and ammunition magazines that remains under legal challenge.
“I’m tired, frankly, of treating something completely preventable as inevitable,” Pritzker, flanked by about a dozen members of the General Assembly and other elected officials, said at a downtown news conference. “I’m tired of forcing our children to duck and cover because too many politicians are ducking and covering for the gun industry’s money.”
One of the new laws is aimed at the safe storage of guns. It reduces the amount of time gun owners have to report lost or stolen firearms from 72 hours to 48 hours after they discover a gun is missing. It also eliminates some exceptions to requirements that guns be kept in a locked box in households where children and teenagers could get a hold of them.
Of course, neither of these measures will do jack squat to actually prevent any child from having to duck and cover. Instead, they just seek to penalize law-abiding gun owners.
Mandatory storage laws--they shouldn't be called "safe storage" because they don't have anything to do with safety--simply tell people that guns need to be locked away if a kid could access them, which most responsible gun owners do already. The exception tends to be very rural households where the kids know guns and need them for self-defense in areas where the nearest law enforcement officer is an hour away, or criminal households where no one cares about the law anyway.
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Reporting stolen guns is a good idea, obviously, and requiring people to report them might cut down on some straw buyers, but the reality is that many people don't put eyes on their firearms every day. They might not even know a gun is missing for weeks.
Now, I'll grant that most of Chicago's problems are because of stolen guns, but how is punishing people who fail to report them stolen going to change anything? It's not like the police have done a great job recovering stolen guns as a general rule. They're kind of easy to hide, unlike a car or something, so how is this going to stop kids from being forced to duck and cover?
And how do these laws hurt the firearm industry that he wants to demonize? They don't.
They just hurt law-abiding citizens, the gun consumers, which is who it's always been about hurting. Just like every other gun control law they've pushed over the last hundred years.
