Right Reason on Second Amendment Rights
Springfield, Illinois
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Sangamon
County Rifle Association Right Reason on Second Amendment Rights Springfield, Illinois |
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 The Year in Review
Tom Shafer SCRA Meeting, January 2, 2006 February 2006 GunNews The huge win for gun owners at the national level, for the gun manufacturing industry and the NRA was the passage of the Federal Lawful Protection in Arms Act. Thats the law that Congress passed and President Bush signed that says you can't sue a gun manufacturer because some guy used a Ruger to hold up a bank in Cleveland. Thats just not going to work. It was junk lawsuits from the beginning designed to force into bankruptcy a lot of lawful firearm manufacturers. A lot of the major cities sued. Chicago filed a 441 million dollar lawsuit against several manufacturers in the gun industry saying the gun industry was responsible for gang crime in Chicago. It was a ludicrous lawsuit. Similar lawsuits have been thrown out of cities such as New Orleans, Baltimore, Philadelphia and were already lost at the state supreme court level in Illinois. Congress has said you can't file them anywhere in the country. So that's a huge victory. In Illinois we had three bills that passed in the legislature in the regular session. Governor Blagojevich vetoed them and we came back in the veto session and came within four votes of overriding an anti-gun governor's veto in an Illinois legislature controlled by that Governor's party. So its a loss because the bills didn't pass into law. One of them was to unify transport laws throughout the state. There are two others that have been covered in GunNews really well and we didn't get them passed into law but we came awfully close. Shafer believes it showed Governor Blagojevich and the majority party in the legislature where the trend is going. As for the two that did pass, one is when you purchase a firearm, long gun, shot gun, rifle and handgun, starting January 1 of this year it will have to be supplied with a trigger lock. The other law that passed is they redefined the definition of firearm to include stun gun and taser. So you can buy a taser new at retail but you must be a FOID card holder to purchase one in Illinois. Shafer said he has no familiarity or use with tasers but he has heard they are a thousand dollars and are the same kind the police carry. They put out two electrical darts which immobilizes the person in time for you to flee. It also puts out these micro chaff which are impregnated with the serial number of the taser you own so when you shoot the guy these small little bits of paper spread out all over and the police can find them and see who tasered the guy. That's not in the law, the taser manufacturer agreed to do that. Those are two laws that passed so whether you call them victories or defeats is up to you. In a familiar local case, the Annette Stevens case. She was one of the founding members of the Million Mom March in Springfield. Shortly after they had their march, (Shafer thinks twelve people attended), police did a search on her home because she had sold drugs to undercover police officers and, they found a handgun with the serial number ground off. So she is facing four felony counts at the state level. She has pled not guilty to all four counts and is facing a January 23 trial date. Shafer will be happily attending the trial of Annette "Flirty" Stevens who is now alleged to be not only a felon and drug dealer but also a gang woman, a female leader of a Springfield street gang. So she is doing pretty well for herself besides her anti-gun activity. So Shafer will be attending the trial and telling us at a later date whether she is convicted and whatever sentencing ensues if she is. Fortunately in 2005 all of Daley's anti-gun agenda in the legislature failed. Daley has a Latino legislator who is a city policeman for the city of Chicago. Daley must have gotten him his state job and his city police job because he does everything Daley says. He's Daley's shill in the legislature. He put in the fifty caliber ban, he tried to get in the assault weapons ban thats never passed in Illinois and he's put in all of the most venomously vocal anti-gun legislation. Shafer knows this legislators biography and is trying to determine if he is worth an episode on Shafer's tv show because fortunately up to this point, he's been totally unsuccessful, as Daley has, in his entire anti-gun legislative agenda. What you haven't seen last year, because the national media is so wrapped up in the Patriot Act and NSA's alleged spying on civilians (which concerns other parts of the Bill of Rights), is they've totally gotten off of the Second Amendment. You don't hear the anti-gun rhetoric, you don't see the anti-gun stories on 60-minutes or on Twenty Twenty or in prime time. In fact they actually put on a pro-gun message in the national media in prime time which is almost unheard of in the last ten or fifteen years. So even though it is hard to predict trends, Shafer believes we are starting to see a trend. The national Democrats with their last two losses for presidents have decided the gun issue is a loser politically. They can push it in New York City, they can push it in Chicago and they can push it in New Orleans but if they take it to a national level, the people they have pushing it, their presidential candidates and their members of Congress lose at elections. So you're starting to see them get off of it. Shafer considers that a huge plus and that we're winning the long term war. From the Capitol Index Return to SCRA Home Page |