In open defiance of several United States Supreme Court rulings on gun ownership, Illinois has enacted a ban on certain kinds of commonly owned firearms and has required owners of other kinds of commonly owned firearms to register them with the state.
So far, compliance with the registration requirement seems to be well under 1%. That’s the good news.
The bad news is that if you refuse to comply and you get caught the first time, that’s a misdemeanor, but the second time it’s a felony. Which means you lose1 your right to own any kind of gun.
In other words, if the government says you have to register your guns, and you decide that it has no authority to do so, you are no longer law-abiding. You are a felon — guilty of the ‘crime’ of believing that the federal constitution actually means what it says.
So according to the government — and for that matter, according to the NRA and the vast majority of ‘gun rights supporters’ that I’ve met — you can’t have guns.
And even when the Supreme Court gets around to striking down that law in a few years, your felony conviction will still stand. So unless you have a pile of money and several years to devote to having it overturned, that won’t be of much help to you.
It’s time for people who think that only ‘law-abiding Americans’ have the right to keep and bear arms to rethink that position, which is what allows laws like this to exist in the first place.
At the very least, simply refusing to be disarmed (or to give the government the information it would need later to disarm you) shouldn’t be grounds for disarming you. That’s the kind of thing that we should be reading about only in novels like Catch-22 and not in our law books.
¹ To be more precise, you don’t actually lose the right, because it is inalienable, which means it can’t be taken from you or even surrendered voluntarily. If you’re a person, you have the right to self-defense and to own the tools necessary for self-defense. But the state will punish you for trying to exercise that right.
