========Yup Tommyex, ILnoise finally joins the other 49 states where the US Constitution 2nd Amendment rights are recognized. When you come to WI on your next cheese run, we have a couple very good gun stores too. LOL.
CHICAGO (AP) — In a major victory for gun rights advocates, a federal appeals court on Tuesday struck down a ban on carrying concealed weapons in Illinois – the only remaining state where carrying concealed weapons is entirely illegal – and gave lawmakers 180 days to write a law that legalizes it.
In overturning a lower court decision, the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the ban was unconstitutional and suggested a law legalizing concealed carry is long overdue in a state where gun advocates had vowed to challenge the ban on every front.
“There is no suggestion that some unique characteristic of criminal activity in Illinois justifies the state’s taking a different approach from the other 49 states,” Judge Richard Posner, who wrote the court’s majority opinion. “If the Illinois approach were demonstrably superior, one would expect at least one or two other states to have emulated it.”
Gun rights advocates were thrilled by the decision. They have long argued that the prohibition violates the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment and what they see as Americans’ right to carry guns for self-defense.
“Christmas came early for law-abiding gun owners,” said state Rep. Brandon Phelps, a Democratic lawmaker from southern Illinois whose proposed legislation approving concealed carry narrowly lost in the Legislature last year. “It’s a mandate.”
Gov. Pat Quinn, who favors strict gun control laws, did not immediately comment on the ruling. In a statement, an aide to Attorney General Lisa Madigan, who is responsible for defending the state’s laws in court, said Madigan’s office would review the ruling before deciding whether to appeal or take other action.
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“The court gave 180 days before its decision will be returned to the lower court to be implemented,” Maura Possley, a Madigan spokeswoman, said in a statement. “That time period allows our office to review what legal steps can be taken and enables the legislature to consider whether it wants to take action.”
Richard Pearson, the executive director of the Illinois State Rifle Association, said there is no reason why lawmakers cannot pass Phelps’ bill during a weeklong legislative session in January.
“Now that the court has ruled … we will work as soon as possible with legislators to craft a concealed carry bill for the state of Illinois,” he said.
The court did order its ruling stayed to “allow the Illinois legislature to craft a new gun law that will impose reasonable limitations, consistent with the public safety and the Second Amendment as interpreted in this opinion, on the carrying of guns in public,” Posner wrote.
Phelps suggested that the court, in its 2-1 ruling, may have encouraged lawmakers to pass a far less restrictive concealed carry law than the one he proposed last year that was rejected.
“I said on the floor, `A lot of people who voted against this, one of these days you’re going to wish you did, because of all the limitations and the safety precautions we put in this bill, because one of these days the court’s going to rule and you’re not going to like the ruling,” he said. “Today’s the day.”
The appellate panel’s majority ruling, which was replete with historical references, argued that Illinois had not made a strong case that a gun ban was vital to public safety. It also was a signal to state lawmakers and gun-ban activists that the time to argue about the Second Amendment has passed.
“We are disinclined to engage in another round of historical analysis to determine whether eighteenth-century America understood the Second Amendment to include a right to bear guns outside the home,” wrote Posner. “The Supreme Court has decided that the amendment confers a right to bear arms for self-defense, which is as important outside the home as inside.”
But the dissenting judge, Ann Claire Williams, raised questions that could come up in a possible appeal or when lawmakers begin to debate and craft a new law addressing the issue.
After saying that “protecting the safety of its citizens is unquestionably a significant state interest,” Williams wrote, “when firearms are carried outside the home, the safety of a broader range of citizens is at issue. The risk of being injured or killed now extends to strangers, law enforcement personnel, and other private citizens who happen to be in the area.”
Gun rights advocates had been threatening to make Illinois once again the center of the national gun-control debate over the issue. In 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court made Chicago’s 28-year-old handgun ban unenforceable, ruling that Americans have the right to have guns in their homes for protection. The city responded by approving alternative methods of restricting who can have guns.
Gun control advocates did not immediately respond to the ruling. But as other states passed concealed carry laws, they had argued that Illinois’ ban was important for their stance in the national debate over gun control.
The country needs “one state people can look to and see it’s still doing the right thing,” Mark Walsh, director of the Illinois Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, said last year.
The ruling Monday stems from a lawsuit filed by a former corrections officer, Michael Moore of Champaign, a farmer, Charles Hooks of Percy in southeastern Illinois and the Bellevue, Wash.-based Second Amendment Foundation.
Good to know that you will be able to pack your arsenal when you cross state lines there plug. Makes me feel great to know all of the ****ing drunken rednecks around here will be packing heat.
If I were you, I'd worry more about the potheads. That redneck's alcohol content is out of his system in a couple hours. With pot, it's in his system a week or more.
Neither one should drive and/or use weapons (including knives, axes, red tractors, crowbars, hammers, screwdrivers, etc). Yup if only OJ Simpson didn't have that gun, Nicholle and Goldman would still be alive......wait, they were murdered with a knife...dang don't you just hate it when FACTs get in the way of a prejudice......
Well anyhoooo, give us a private message when you can join us in Beaver Dam for coffee-pie-(or other calories you prefer). roger7 is near BD so we'll all have a good time.
well it appears that "tall" troll has been a bad, busy boy.....13 threads in a row here with his spew. Oh well, anyhooo predictably TommyEx will post his theory that it was guns responsible for that NH mass killing. Hey, the nut could have done more mayhem if he'd used a couple large soda bottles of gasoline, a rag fuse and a Bic lighter. Are we also gonna ban gasoline, rags and Bics? Just like Columbine, the movie theater, and the shootings at Cong. Gifford's event, the killers were on drugs. It won't be any different with today's nutcase murderer.........
GP
In mass shootings involving guns and mind-altering medications, politicians immediately seek to blame guns but never the medication. Nearly every mass shooting that has taken place in America over the last two decades has a link to psychiatric medication, and it appears today's tragic event is headed in the same direction.
According to ABC News, Adam Lanza, the alleged shooter, has been labeled as having "mental illness" and a "personality disorder." These are precisely the words typically heard in a person who is being "treated" with mind-altering psychiatric drugs.
One of the most common side effects of psychiatric drugs is violent outbursts and thoughts of suicide.
Note: The shooter was originally mid-identified as Ryan Lanza but has now been corrected to Adam Lanza.
The Columbine High School shooters were, of course, on psychiatric drugs at the time they shot their classmates in 1999. Suicidal tendencies and violent, destructive thoughts are some of the admitted behavioral side effects of mind-altering prescription medications.
No gun can, by itself, shoot anyone. It must be triggered by a person who makes a decision to use it. And while people like NY Mayor Bloomberg are predictably trying to exploit the deaths of these children to call for guns to be stripped from all law abiding citizens who have done nothing wrong whatsoever, nobody calls for medication control.
Why is that? After all, medication alters the mind that controls the finger that pulls the trigger. The saying that "guns kill people" is physically impossible. People kill other people, and as we all learned from watching the O.J. Simpson trial, you don't need a gun to commit murder.
We should be outlawing psychiatric medications, not an inanimate piece of metal
If there is to be any legitimate debate on so-called "gun control" in the aftermath of this shooting, the only idea that makes any sense at all would be to restrict gun purchases by people currently taking psychiatric medications. But even that restriction would of course be abused by the government to take guns away from perfectly healthy, law-abiding citizens who innocently seek treatment for mild depression and who honestly have no clue that psychiatric drugs can cause violent behavior.
A far better solution here would be to outlaw psychiatric drugs that cause the violent behavior in the first place. After all, if you only outlaw guns but fail to eliminate the drugs that cause the violence, people dosed up on mind-altering meds will simply find alternate weapons to commit the same acts of violence. You don't think a crazy guy with a sword can hack up 20 or 30 kids in a school? A sword, a knife or even a pick axe can be just as deadly as a firearm.
A guy with a chain saw can do all kinds of damage if he's out of his mind. Should we ban chain saws?
I have thought for quite some time that people on medication are dangerous operating automobiles on public roads. If driving drunk is illegal, why isn't "driving on meds" illegal? Why are wildly medicated people allowed to operate heavy machinery?
A high-ranking police officer in Tucson, Arizona once told me, on the record, that one-third of all automobile accidents in the city of Tucson were related to medicated drivers. That's an astonishing number, and if true, it would seem to indicate that medications are more dangerous than guns when it comes to the total daily body count.
Do the math: medications are far more deadly than guns
Medications kill roughly 100,000 Americans each year according to study statistics. The actual number is either 98,000 or 106,000 depending on which study you believe.
For guns to be as deadly as medications, you'd have to see a Newton-style massacre happening ten times a day, every day of the year. Only then would "gun violence" even match up to the number of deaths caused by doctor-prescribed, FDA-approved medications.
Why does America grieve for the children killed in Newton, but not for the medical victims killed by Big Pharma? Are the lives of people on medication not valuable compared to the lives of children in elementary school? Will Obama shed a tear for the victims of Big Pharma, or are his tears reserved only for politically expedient events that push his agenda of unconstitutional gun restrictions?
If our goal us to stop the violence in America, we are completely dishonest if we do not consider the mental causes of violent behavior. And that starts with mind-altering psychiatric drugs which I believe have unleashed a drug-induced epidemic of violence across our nation.
Obama, Bloomberg and others will point to guns and try to convince you that inanimate metal objects are the cause of this violence. But they lie by omission. No guns shoots itself. The trigger must be pulled by someone, and the mental state of that person is the primary cause of the resulting action. To ignore this fundamental chain of facts is brutally dishonest.
The typical mass murderer is a mentally-ill sad-sack loser who’s bad at work, bad with women, and who finally snaps in frustration at his own momentous loserdom. Usually it’s a break-up or a pink slip that sets him off and usually the targets are strangers. And these guys do illegal drugs, what a combo, being nuts and adding chemistry to the blender. Chopped nuts.
Ban guns, ban longer magazines, we're gonna hear it all. How about we ban any Kennedy from driving? Well maybe since GM discontinued the Oldsmobile, women are safe?
I say require every one to carry a gun. Every criminal will know his victim is armed. Every crazy man will be met with a barrage of return fire. It all goes back to when guns are outlawed only outlaws will have guns.
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