A major gun licensing reform bill will not make it out of the Illinois legislature this session.
Backers of the “Fix the FOID” act, which was largely a response to a mass shooting in Aurora in February, have vowed to bring back the measure for another try.
Proponents say the bill is needed to strengthen background checks for gun owners and provide more funding to better enforce existing laws that bar dangerous people from possessing weapons.
The measure, which would have increased fees for gun licenses and required all applicants be fingerprinted, won House approval earlier this week despite opposition from lawmakers who said it infringed on Second Amendment rights. But legislators told the Tribune on Friday that the bill would not be called for a vote in the Illinois Senate.
The failure of the bill that was prompted by one mass shooting happened to occur on the day of another mass shooting, this one in Virginia Beach, Va., where local authorities said 11 people were killed Friday.
The February mass shooting in Aurora — by a revoked Illinois license holder who should never have been able to purchase the handgun he used to kill five people — became a rallying cry for supporters who wanted to close loopholes in the law.
But the legislation faced strong opposition, with detractors calling the proposed new regulations among the most “onerous” in the nation and an infringement on their constitutional rights.
The bill was debated for three hours in the House, with Downstate and suburban Republican lawmakers challenging the need to fingerprint or raise fees on lawful gun owners.
On Friday, Democrat Julie Morrison, the Senate sponsor of the bill, spoke strongly in support of it but said she ran out of time to explain to fellow senators the significant changes it proposed.
“I feel confident that it is going to become law,” Morrison said. “It’s just not going to become law May 31.”
Kathleen Sances, president of the Gun Violence Prevention PAC, which was involved in drafting the legislation, is holding out hope the proposal will come for a vote before the Senate at a later date.
“We’re really thrilled that we were able to get the bill out of the House, and I really have to give credit to Rep. (Kathleen) Willis,” Sances said of the bill’s House sponsor. “We ran out of time in the Senate. … So moving forward we’ll just be talking with both chambers and we’ll see what we can do to get enough votes to pass it in the Senate.”
Morrison said the legislation could be taken up in November during the veto session.
The call to require fingerprinting to obtain a state firearms license, known commonly as a FOID, gained serious steam after Aurora gunman Gary Martin opened fire with a Smith & Wesson handgun at the Henry Pratt Co. and killed five co-workers. Martin, a convicted felon, was prohibited from owning a gun and had his FOID card revoked by Illinois State Police in 2014. But he managed to keep both the license and the Smith & Wesson he used in the mass shooting.
A Tribune investigation in May found the state stripped more than 34,000 residents of their FOID cards over the past four years. But because of a lack of follow-up, law enforcement does not know what nearly 80 percent of those people have done with their weapons, the Tribune found. As many as 30,000 guns are unaccounted for, the report found.
Willis, the House sponsor, vowed to continue the fight to pass the legislation.
“While I am disappointed … I remain committed to continue to work over the summer with the stakeholders to return with a bill that will … address the issues with the (FOID) system and make our state safer,” Willis, a Democrat, said in a statement to the Tribune.
Besides the fingerprinting provision, the measure would have increased the application fee from $10 for a 10-year FOID card to $20 for five years. Some of the additional revenue would have funded a task force to account for the firearms of revoked cardholders.
The Illinois State Police, in the wake of Aurora, instituted major changes to how FOID card revocation details are shared among law enforcement, taking the unprecedented step of creating a database listing every revoked cardholder statewide.
The information, which has been shared with most departments, includes the crucial information about firearms purchasing history for each revoked cardholder and the reason for the revocation. State police also announced they planned to form regional task forces to help communities address their backlogs.
But all of this now appears to be happening without any additional money that the legislation would have provided through the fee increase.
“Long-term, more funding is critical to addressing the revocations and the backlog, but in the meantime the work needs to continue,” said Cara Smith, chief policy officer for the Cook County sheriff’s office, which has a revocation team. “Dangerous people are revoked every day.”
Tribune reporter Stacy St. Clair contributed.
asweeney@chicagotribune.com
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May 31, 2019 at 09:12PM
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