CCRKBA TO ILLINOIS: PENALIZE CRIMINALS, NOT GUNMAKERS
BELLEVUE, WA – A proposal in Illinois to require gunmakers to contribute to a special fund designed to offset the financial burden to taxpayers resulting from shootings is an idiotic effort to make the firearms industry responsible for the actions of criminals, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms says.
“Instead of putting criminals behind bars and keeping them off the streets,” said CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb, “the ‘Responsibility in Firearms Legislation Act’ holds gun manufacturers financially responsible for crimes often committed by people who can’t legally own guns because of prior criminal history. Why are these people on the street in the first place?
“By introducing this legislation,” he continued, “lawmakers in Springfield and their anti-gun allies are tacitly admitting that all of their current gun laws are not working, they haven’t worked in the past and they won’t work in the future. It’s just easier to blame the firearms industry, which would have to pass such costs onto law-abiding consumers, than it would be to hold hoodlums, gang bangers and crazy people responsible for crimes they commit.
“Backers of this stupid proposal claim Illinois will ‘save’ $300 million annually,” Gottlieb noted. “What they’re really saying is that they expect to get that amount from the gun industry during the first year. How much would the state actually save by simply locking up repeat offenders for a very long time, sending a message to other miscreants to change their behavior? How many lives might be saved by keeping violent criminals behind bars for years? How much would be saved by hiring more police to patrol certain neighborhoods in force?
“By locking up criminals, we make the neighborhoods safer,” he said. “There’s a value in that.”
“This proposed law is just a rebranding of past failed gun control schemes to financially penalize lawful gun makers and their honest customers for the crimes of others,” he observed. “In essence, Illinois lawmakers are once again trying to make manufacturers and law-abiding citizens their collective whipping boy rather than take the truly courageous and necessary steps against actual criminal perpetrators.
“Bad actors who are kept in jails and prisons aren’t out on the streets and in the neighborhoods shooting at each other with guns they illegally obtained, and harming innocent bystanders in the process,” Gottlieb concluded.
