IL residents: Don’t strap on just yet…

The State Journal-Register published an article late Monday urging gun owners to hold their horses and not FOID-carry just yet, after the 9-0 Aguilar decision from the Illinois Supreme Court.

The word we are getting from Todd Vandermyde and others is that you face minimal risk of prosecution for *concealed* carrying a firearm with your FOID card pretty much anywhere in Illinois, except in Cook and Champaign Counties.  In Champaign County, the local State’s Attorney has said she will still prosecute, despite these court rulings that blanket prohibitions on carry outside the home are unconstitutional.

I talked with one of the key people in the Champaign County Sheriff’s Office last week and he said that police chiefs and the sheriff had been in talks with the local SA, but if there was an agreement not to prosecute or arrest, word of that hasn’t filtered down to the line officers or their supervisors.  “We’ve not encountered anyone doing this yet, but it’s just a matter of time,” he said.  Until that happens, he said, they are proceeding as if Aguilar never happened.  He didn’t discount that there may have already been contacts where officers have kicked loose a FOID-carrier.

We, as Guns Save Life, do NOT recommend carrying on your FOID card.  While you may ultimately win, you don’t want to have to rely on officer discretion not to make an arrest and take you to jail, where you will have to spend significant numbers of $100 bills to make this go away.  And there’s always the remote possibility you might lose if it goes to trial or on appeal.

(State Journal-Register) – Despite the Illinois Supreme Court’s ruling this month that struck down parts of the state’s gun control laws, area law enforcement officials are cautioning gun owners to hold off carrying weapons in public until the state can fully implement its new concealed-carry law.

“The law is still relatively new, and we know that people are going to purposely try to become a test case,” Sangamon County Undersheriff Jack Campbell said. “We’re going to use discretion. If we find somebody carrying a weapon, we’ll likely write a report and hand it over to the state’s attorney and let him use the facts of the case to decide whether he wants to prosecute. If we feel it’s necessary, there’s a very good chance we’ll seize the weapon.”

The state’s high court ruled 7-0 earlier this month in the case of Alberto Aguilar, a then-17-year-old charged under a state law that bars people from carrying weapons outside the home. The court ruled that such a “comprehensive ban” is unconstitutional, while noting that the Second Amendment right could still be subject to meaningful regulation.

The decision falls in line with a federal appellate court’s decision last year that lifted state’s ban on concealed carry.

Even prior to this month’s ruling, more than a dozen state’s attorneys had begun refusing to prosecute law-abiding citizens who choose to carry a weapon in public. And Sangamon County State’s Attorney John Milhiser said last week he doesn’t intend to prosecute cases where the person didn’t use a gun to commit a crime.