Illinois is doing some pretty great things with guns these days — by which I mean the state is making it a whole lot tougher for terrible people to get the kind of terrible weaponry that makes a mass shooting so easy these days, as well as taking on the gun manufacturers.
On Friday, the Illinois Supreme Court found the state’s ban on semiautomatic weapons entirely constitutional and on Saturday, Gov. Pritzker signed the Firearm Industry Responsibility Act into law, which will “prohibit advertising and marketing that encourages para-military or unlawful private militia activity and advertising to individuals under 18,” bar gun companies from creating cartoons, stuffed animals and children’s clothing for marketing purposes and make it possible for victims of gun violence to sue gun manufacturers.
Why are we so happy about all of this? Because it’s going to make conservative gun owners unhappy. Or at least that’s what they think. Surely it couldn’t be that we don’t want to worry about kids getting their hands on AR-15s and shooting up their schools or anything. After all, who doesn’t love that?
Perhaps the unhappiest of all Republicans in the state right now is Darren Bailey, who lost to Pritzker in the last gubernatorial election. He is so unhappy, in fact, that he stood in front of an American flag on his porch this week and threatened to suicide by cop if someone comes to take his semiautomatic guns away from him.
He said:
I’m standing here on my front porch. This porch kind of became famous through the governor’s run, it became famous when I was speaking on nonsense. And I made a statement. And sometimes when we make these statements, we don’t know where this is going to go, but if need be, this front porch will be my final stand. I will not allow anyone to infringe on my property, on my Second Amendment rights. I will not allow anyone to come and take anything from me. And if need be, as I quoted before, I will die on this front porch before I give up any of my Second Amendment freedoms.
It would certainly be a fitting homage to the aspiring mass killers who will no longer have the opportunity to go down in a suicide-by-cop blaze of glory themselves thanks to this law.
Of course, no one is actually coming for Bailey’s guns. The ban is on the purchase, sale or import of “assault weapons, assault weapon attachments, .50-caliber rifles or .50-caliber cartridges,” but those who already own them will get to keep them and will have until 2024 to register them with the state police — which surely those who “back the blue” have no problem with.
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