WE WILL NOT KNEEL TO ANYONE: HB-5855 Update

by John Boch
GSL Executive Director
The Illinois General Assembly will pass a Draconian gun control measure currently under consideration. HB-5855 will make the vast majority of 2.4 million Illinois gun owners felons.

How so? There are plenty of ways, but the most obvious: if you have two or more magazines that hold over ten rounds.

Meanwhile, on the streets of Chicago, gang members sporting fully-automatic Glock pistols drive around in stolen cars robbing people each and every day with impunity. Even for those gang members not victimizing others regularly, the Glock “switch” has become the “must have” prestige item. It turns the pistol into a genuine machinegun. What’s more, it’s not like they’re hard to get. You can print them on a 3-D printer.

We can’t recall seeing the Soros-funded Cook County State’s Attorney charging any gangsters with possession of these machineguns even when Chicago police recover switch-equipped Glocks on a daily basis. One district recently showed off five seven it confiscated in a single day.

If only the anti-gun “legislators” from Chicago cared about as much about criminalizing criminals instead of law-abiding gun owners, our state would become a lot safer for all of us.

But back to House Bill 5855… What are we going to do about it?  We’re going to push their “stuff” in, that’s what. We’re going to do it in a court of law.

Under the Bruen decision, modern gun control measures must be historically analogous to common gun control regulations on the books in 1791.

For instance, how many states had FOID cards in 1791? (Our lawsuit challenging the FOID Act will likely get an initial ruling later this month or in January.)

Prohibitions on whole categories of firearms runs not only afoul of the Bruen decision, but of pre-Bruen precedent from the Illinois Supreme Court. The “Supremes” in Springfield ruled in 2019 in People v. Webb that the state cannot ban a whole category of weapons under the Heller and McDonald SCOTUS decisions.

And now, we have a MUCH stronger Bruen precedent from the US Supreme Court. From the Harvard Journal of Public Policy:

Bruen’s embrace of the text-and-history test provides clear guideposts for how the constitutionality of these types of bans must now be assessed. In short, there is zero historical support from the Founding—or even the Reconstruction era—for banning commonly possessed arms; under the Bruen test, that is the end of the matter.

Bruen is so profound, in fact, that the chief justice of the US Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals (which covers part of Illinois) said the Second Amendment has gone from a second-class right to a supercharged right.

Clearly the anti-gun political leadership in Illinois doesn’t give a damn about Supreme Court precedent – either Illinois or at the federal level. J.B. Pritzker wants this law as one of the centerpieces of his upcoming 2023 announcement that he’s running for President.

Making good people helpless won’t make bad people harmless.

Pritzker’s reportedly bankrolling – to the tune of millions – the public relations push by a new non-profit perversely named “Protect Illinois Communities.” Ol’ JB hired a politically-connected, high dollar lobbyist and crisis management specialist to sell the unconstitutional gun control measure using fears and emotions.

Pritzker and his friends easily have the votes to pass 5855 with a simple majority of both houses after January 1.  Don’t delude yourself into thinking it’s even close.  We have *maybe* 50 votes in the lame-duck House… of 118.  We have maybe 22 in the Senate…  of 58. 

It has an immediate effective date, so when Pritzker’s pen hits the paper, the bulk of Illinois gun owners instantly become felons. We expect that to happen in mid- to late-January-ish.

To stop this authoritarian stunt, Guns Save Life has joined a coalition of political, industry and advocacy groups, along with the state’s biggest gun range to line up competent (key word) local counsel in Illinois to file constitutional challenges to 5855. Guns Save Life has also lined up multiple courageous potential individual plaintiffs, including some well-known names.

Not only that, but we (as the coalition) have reached out to other key groups and stakeholders to work cooperatively with them to coordinate our attacks, minimize duplicative filings and share the load and costs of filing lawsuits.

The tentative plan is to file lawsuits in a multi-prong attack over days or weeks following enactment to keep the pressure up. We expect we’ll get a temporary restraining order to block enforcement of the new law within a few weeks at most. Once the TRO is in place, we can litigate it and get a permanent injunction.

But these lawsuits will require donations to fuel them. The firms we’re working with have pledged discounted hourly rates. Experts like Chuck Michele from California, who successfully got Cali’s magazine ban overturned, and then their semi-auto ban overturned, tell us to expect to spend low six-figures per case and maybe a million if it goes to the US Supreme Court.

Fortunately, we have Bruen, so we’re not creating (and paying for) new precedent.

In the meantime, we won’t be negotiating with the sponsors of 5855 and we probably won’t play nicely with anyone who undercuts Land of Lincoln gun owners by negotiating just to have a “seat at the table.” We will not give the gun control fanatics a roadmap on how to make a bad bill better.

Not only that, but we encourage individuals not to pick the bill apart in social media posts, or in letters to legislators or newspaper editorial pages. Again, don’t give gun control jihadists a roadmap to pass a more palatable bill.

I assure you, we’re not kneeling to these would-be tyrants. And you shouldn’t either.