I've often said that universal background checks help create something of a gun registry. After all, if every purchase has to go through a licensed dealer and paperwork must be filled out for each one, which creates a paper trail. That is a gun registry of sorts. It might not be an efficient one, but it is what it is.
And in Illinois, a lot of people are concerned about where the state's Gun Violence Prevention Committee might take that de facto registry.
After all, it sure looks like they want to do some stuff that might create problems for law-abiding gun owners.
When the new General Assembly was seated and rules were agreed upon last month, legislators created the Illinois House Gun Violence Prevention Committee.
During the committee’s first hearing last week, two measures were discussed. One would modify the state’s interaction with the federal eTrace program. Illinois Attorney General deputy chief of staff John Carroll tried to allay concerns around House Bill 1337 and on how eTrace would be used by state and local law enforcement.
“It’s not on the fly, ‘gimme your gun, I’m going to run it through eTrace, you can have your gun back,’ that’s not how it works,” Carroll told the committee last week. “eTrace is not instantaneous.”
The Illinois State Rifle Association was concerned an innocent gun owner could find themselves charged with a crime if eTrace doesn’t show they had sold a gun to someone else 15 years ago in a private transfer.
“Could you be charged, at least temporarily, with owning a stolen firearm,” ISRA’s Ed Sullivan asked. “There’s no way to know that I purchased the gun 15 years ago from somebody else and … law enforcement would not have a record of that transaction.”
State Rep. Curtis Tarver, D-Chicago, said his measure is a work in progress.
“This is not a tool to charge the individual who necessarily has a firearm as much as it is understanding whose firearm it was in the first place, that is the intent,” Tarver told the committee.
The problem with a tool like eTrace is that if it exists, someone is going to use it in the exact way officials are claiming it's not supposed to be used.
And even if everything was handled above-board, even after universal background checks were enacted, the truth is that any database can have errors. After all, just look at what DOGE dug up regarding the age of some people in the Social Security Administration's database. According to that, there are living people running around who were around when we were still British colonies.
What's happening in Illinois has the potential to create massive problems, and we need to remember that bad ideas never stay in one state. They spread to others like a virus. This will pop up somewhere else down the road. I think we all know it, too.
The Illinois State Rifle Association isn't wrong to be concerned. They should be very worried, especially if nothing in law or state regulation explicitly prevents it from being used in such a way.
