By Paul Lathrop | Contributing Editor
While Illinois has issued some 340,000 concealed carry permits since the state adopted a “shall issue” system in 2014, the system has become bogged down by the State Police bureaucracy.
That was the word from Richard Pearson, executive director of the Illinois State Rifle Association (ISRA) during an interview with the Second Amendment Foundation’s “Daily Bullet” podcast.
Pearson explained that when permitting began the state police used computers that were so old they ran on Fortran and had to have technicians from India come in to work on the system as no one here knew how to work on the antiquated systems. Despite the appropriation of funds to upgrade the system, the state police resisted the upgrade. The ISRA sued to force streamlining of the process and the upgrades have begun.
Pearson then went on to estimate that state-wide ISRA is estimating that there will soon be 3 million FOID (Firearms Owner Identification) cardholders in the state in the near future, while the total population of the state is approximately 12 million.
The opening question to Pearson was how and when the organization was formed. He explained that ISRA was founded in 1903 with the Defense Appropriation Act of 1903, and was one of the first state-level associations to train civilians in marksmanship.
The conversation then moved to recent successes by the ISRA.
“We like to say Illinois contains Chicago, and the rest of the state is just like America,” Pearson quipped.
He then recalled the Otis McDonald case that resulted in an historic Supreme Court victory in 2010.
McDonald, the ISRA, and SAF sued the state of Illinois. They won that action, nullifying Chicago’s 30-year-old handgun ban and incorporating the Second Amendment to the states via the 14th Amendment. A subsequent lawsuit forced the state legislature to adopt a concealed carry statute, the last state in the country to adopt concealed carry.
Speaking of concealed carry ruling Pearson stated, “But that was the simple part of the ruling, it could have been a may issue, and when we decided to go for this we had two things that we would not leave out. One, we would not leave out anybody in Chicago, and two it had to be a shall-issue state, not a may-issue state.”
Both were realized.
To become a member of the Illinois State Rifle Association go to their website www.ISRA.org and click the join button.
