100th District Representative CD Davidsmeyer says that Illinois State Police Director Brendan Kelly’s ideas on the FOID are going after the wrong people. Davidsmeyer called the idea of fingerprinting gun owners in the state the wrong way to decrease gun crime. He says its a terrible overreach and won’t fix gun problems or the FOID program. “After years in Springfield and watching what comes out of Springfield, they don’t know how to go after the criminals. Their system is broken and they need to fix their system. The Aurora shooter, for instance, they caught him after he failed a fingerprint test for a conceal-carry license. The federal background check system should have caught that. We have to work with the federal government to make sure that the federal background check system is doing what it is supposed to be doing. This was a failed circumstance of the federal system. We need to work with our federal legislator, the President, as far up as we need to go to ensure that this does not happen. Putting the additional burden, the additional financial burden on legal gun owners, who 99.999% of the time will never commit a crime is absolutely ridiculous. We keep going after the same things.”
Davidsmeyer says the current FOID system in the state makes Illinois citizens second class to out of state visitors. He says he would be in favor of abolishing the FOID system altogether. “My father-in-law comes from Ohio and comes to visit to go hunting. He can buy ammunition just by saying he’s not from Illinois or showing his driver’s license that show’s he’s not from Illinois. I have to show a FOID card, which I have to pay for to get. Do I mind the background check? I’m not afraid of a background check, but I’m still a second class citizen in my own state to exercise my 2nd Amendment rights. I don’t think that’s right.”
Davidsmeyer says that criminal justice reforms should be about holding gun crime accountable and not punishing gun owners. “There’s a few [criminal justice reforms] in current proposals that I think are the right thing to do. I don’t want to punish them for the rest of their life. When you’re going after gun crime, I received a phone call from a group last week asking if I would be willing to support a bill to get rid of mandatory sentences for crimes committed with a firearm. I said you’re going after legal gun owners but you want to decrease the penalty for people who are using guns in crimes. It’s the absolute complete opposite direction of the way you should go. While I’m okay with some criminal justice reform, I think that if we have to set a precedent for a crime committed with a gun, firearm, or any weapon; those crimes will not stand.”
Davidsmeyer says that the revolving door for criminals who use a weapon in a crime need to be held in jail and tried for their crimes. He says that a case-by-case basis needs to be taken into account for cash bail but the system shouldn’t be abolished, especially for gun crime. Davidsmeyer voted ‘no’ on the new provisions for the FOID on Senate Bill 1966 that passed the House last May.