Republican lawmakers, gun enthusiasts and Illinois State Police agree: The state’s system for keeping firearms out of dangerous hands is broken.
According to state police who issue firearm permits, average waiting times for firearm owner identification (FOID) cards have stretched to four months; under state law, cards, which are required to purchase guns and ammunition, are supposed to be issued within 30 days. The average wait for a concealed weapons permit, state police say, is 145 days.
“These outcomes are unacceptable to ISP,” the agency says in a recent press release. ISP director Brendan Kelly, a former downstate Democratic prosecutor, is calling for an overhaul of the state’s gun permitting laws, long a target of conservatives.
Wait times have been exacerbated by surges in requests for FOID cards and concealed weapons permits. In 2017, the agency received 166,649 FOID card applications; through November, ISP this year has received 445,945 applications. Even before 2020, state police have failed to timely process applications while fees paid by applicants have been diverted to purposes other than processing applications.
“It’s like going to McDonalds and paying them $20 for a Coke and hamburger and all you get is an empty tray – you’re still hungry,” says Richard Pearson, executive director of the Illinois Rifle Association. “This is a fee for service: You pay the fee, and you don’t get the service.” The FOID card application fee is $10; the state charges $150 to apply for a concealed weapons permit. The rifle association has sued the state in federal court, contending that delays in issuing FOID cards amount to denial of Second Amendment rights.
Gov. JB Pritzker hasn’t diverted application monies. Since last March, state police have hired 21 people to help ease the application backlog and expects another 11 new people to start work in January. Employees from other divisions have been temporarily assigned to process applications, and 17,000 hours of overtime have been logged, state police say. But that isn’t sufficient, according to Kelly, who is calling on lawmakers to revise the state’s gun permitting system, including the law establishing FOID cards that critics claim is unconstitutional and that the director says is dysfunctional.
Kelly’s call to revise gun-permitting laws comes after a truncated legislative session during which lawmakers failed to enact the director’s recommendation to require fingerprinting of FOID card applicants to help ensure that guns won’t get into the wrong hands. Legislators also have failed to enact proposals that would increase the FOID application fee from $10 to $50 while shortening the time that a card is valid to five years from 10 years.
Problems with controlling access to guns persist nearly two years after a workplace shooting in Aurora that resulted in the deaths of five people, plus the gunman, who was killed by police. The gunman legally purchased his weapon but shouldn’t have been allowed to own a gun by virtue of a felony conviction in Mississippi. Authorities in Illinois say Mississippi failed to enter information on the 1995 conviction into a database. State police realized the gunman shouldn’t have had a firearm after he applied for a concealed weapons permit and provided fingerprints, which resulted in the Mississippi conviction being flagged. But there is no evidence that state police contacted local police, who have authority to take guns from holders of revoked FOID cards. Lawsuits against Illinois and Mississippi filed by survivors of the shooting as well as relatives of the deceased are pending.
“Aurora showed to everyone that Illinois should be using less of our resources on an antiquated, outdated, inefficient, ineffective renewal process from the 1960s and more on enforcement against real threats to public safety,” Kelly said in a written statement. “Our people believe in building a system that makes it hard for the bad guys and simple and safe for the good guys. The Illinois State Police will keep pushing hard, but frankly we will need authority from the legislature to untangle, streamline and integrate the aging patchwork of FOID, concealed carry, firearms transactions, and records checks if we are going to fulfill this mission.”
During a Dec. 9 press conference conducted via Zoom, House Republicans told reporters that constituents have been waiting as long as a year for FOID cards and that some retailers have been reluctant to sell guns and ammo to people with expired cards, even though the state has said that expired cards are valid due to the backlog.
“Why would a retailer want to take the risk of being held liable for bad actors when that is what the state of Illinois is specifically supposed to be doing through the (FOID) program?” Rep. C.D. Davidson, R-Jacksonville, said. “If they (state police) can’t do it through this program, we should get rid of it.”
Pearson says he trusts the Pritzker administration, at least for now, to fix the FOID mess. “Until they give a reason not to trust them, I’m going to trust them,” he says. “We’re going to do what we have to do to get it fixed. If you don’t work with the other side, who are you going to work with? You can’t just fold your arms and stamp your feet.”
Still, Pearson says the FOID program may be at an existential point.
“If this isn’t fixed, the FOID card system is going to collapse,” he said.
Contact Bruce Rushton at brushton@illinoistimes.com.
This article appears in Springfield dreams.
