(IL) Quinn signs measure requiring gun owners to report missing firearms, check buyer's background

[Robb]

Illinois gun owners will have to report missing firearms to police and check the background of potential buyers under a law Gov. Pat Quinn enacted Sunday.

Quinn signed the legislation at a South Side park near where an off-duty Chicago police officer was killed with an illegally trafficked gun in 2010. He said the law will make it easier to recover stolen weapons and help ensure that only responsible people buy firearms. The measure passed both chambers of the Illinois General Assembly with healthy majorities.

"It's going to help our law enforcement," the Democratic governor said. "It's going to help all of us be safe."

Starting immediately, gun owners whose weapons are lost or stolen will have 72 hours to notify police. And beginning Jan. 1, individual gun owners will have to contact the Illinois State Police before selling a weapon or transferring ownership to ensure that the purchaser is allowed to have a gun.

Read More: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/chi-quinn-signs-gun-bill-20130818,0,6251315.story

[Squinch]

1. I might be missing it, but there is nothing in the article that says what

the penalty is for not reporting your firearm stolen within 72 hours. If there is no penalty, that law is useless.

The penalty should be that if you don't report a firearm stolen and it is used in the commission of a crime, you get a proportion of the penalty for that crime. So say your gun is used in a crime and you haven't reported it lost or stolen, and the criminal gets a sentence of 60 months, you then need to spend 6 months in jail.

Our laws need to start to reflect the fact that an unsecured gun is a whole lot more dangerous than a bag of weed.

[Loudly]

2. Ineligibility for a FOID card might be a more appropriate penalty.

If knowledge of the theft can be shown.

[Squinch]

3. No. Expulsion from the ability to play at a hobby isn't an appropriate penalty when you have

facilitated the use of a deadly weapon in the commission of a crime. It should come with jail time in acknowledgment that the crime is partly the irresponsible gun owner's fault.

And if the gun was stolen, and the gun owner was unaware that his gun was stolen, that shouldn't make him immune to the penalty. The lack of knowledge about where his gun is constitutes evidence of a criminal irresponsibility.