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There’s a good reason that law abiding gun owners don’t want their names on a national gun registry — namely, registration leads to confiscation. Gun control advocates immediately spout that “no one wants to take your guns” and other assorted platitudes designed to comfort gun owners about the prospect of being treated like sex offenders. And yet, from the city of Chicago comes a story of exactly that: registered gun owners having their guns confiscated . . .
In Illinois, gun owners are required to get a Firearms Owners ID card, or FOID. It’s good for 10 years, and then you need to renew it. But if you don’t renew your card, or if you do something that displeases the powers that be, your FOID is NULL and VOID. Which means you can’t own guns legally.
Cook County police officers have become increasingly worried that when someone’s FOID card is revoked, their guns aren’t instantly confiscated. So they’re doing exactly what gun control advocates have said that registration would never result in — door to door confiscation.
From the Sun Times:
A new Cook County Sheriff’s team is crisscrossing the suburbs to seize guns from thousands of people whose Firearm Owner’s Identification Cards have been revoked.
More than 3,000 people in Cook County have failed to surrender their revoked FOID cards to the state. Sheriff Tom Dart said he thinks many of them continue to possess firearms.
The Chicago Police Department conducts regular missions to recover revoked FOID cards and seize guns from the holders, but there wasn’t a concerted effort to do that in Cook County’s suburbs, Dart said.
“The system is broken,” the sheriff said. “The system revokes cards, but the guns are of no consequence. . . . Our strong hope is that we will eliminate tragedies.”
We’ve said it before and we will say it again — registration only impacts the law abiding. Its raison d’etre is knowing where the firearms are when it’s time to go and get them. Criminals are exempt from the registration requirement due to the illegal nature of their activities, so keeping guns out of the hands of bad guys is a bogus claim when registration advocates try to make it. Registration only applies to the law abiding citizens. Period.
But the real issue is that gun confiscation schemes like this one don’t actually make the public any safer. In fact, I’d make the argument that registration and door-to-door confiscation like this encourage mentally ill people to avoid getting the help they need.
Imagine that you have a FOID card in Illinois. You also own guns and would like to keep them. One day, you come to the conclusion that you might benefit from some counseling. Now, would you be more or less likely to seek mental health treatment if you believed that doing so would result in the local police knocking on your door and taking your guns?
I get the feeling that FOID cards actually make Cook County residents less safe. Then again, I posses a seemingly rare skill called “common sense.”
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