Will We Stop Tyrants, or Will the Courts Step In?

Judges are political creatures. They know who elected them or who appointed them. They know what they need to do to get promoted. In some cases, judges have overturned unjust laws and so restrained the tyranny of the majority. That doesn’t work all the time. Abusive politicians have imposed unjust laws and those laws have been upheld by the courts. Honest citizens have often imposed their own justice when the courts refused to defend our rights. We are seeing that situation play out again with gun owners in Illinois.

Illinois politics are dominated by Chicago. Democrats controlled the Illinois state senate and state assembly for over two decades. Democrat legislators recently required honest gun owners to register their semi-automatic long guns. The deadline for registration is the first day of 2024. Registration opened on the first of October, so more than a third or the registration period has passed. So far, only 4-out-of-1000 of the affected gun owners have registered their rifles and shotguns.

Illinois has a lot of gun-control laws already. Illinois citizens need to obtain a state license before they can buy a gun. The required Firearms Owners Identification Card requires a national and local background check. Thus, any legal gun owner in Illinois has passed at least one background check and has a clean criminal record. Illinois gun owners had to pass a background check before they could purchase ammunition. Even individuals from out of state can not purchase a firearm in Illinois without first obtaining a license and passing a background check. Historically, obtaining that Firearms Owners Identification card took months or years.

Perhaps gun owners in Illinois didn’t know that the new registration law had changed. Perhaps gun owners knew about the new law but didn’t know that their firearms were affected. Perhaps they will register at the last minute and comply with the law. That could happen. It isn’t impossible.

That isn’t what we’ve seen in other states and municipalities. San Jose, California required that gun owners turn in their regulated magazines. Connecticut required registration of so-called “assault weapons.” The state of New Jersey outlawed a type of brace that let injured individuals shoot a rifle even if  they had the use of only one arm. Those gun-bans were ignored, and not a little. In some cases no one complied. In some cases, it was a fraction of a percent who complied so disobedience was almost complete. In some cases, even the vast majority of law enforcement officers ignored the registration requirements.

These gun registrations and gun bans have a mixed history in court. There are a number of court districts that consistently ignore the rulings of the US Supreme Court when it comes to the right to bear arms. Recently, we’ve seen cases where the Supreme Court ruled that lower courts made a mistake in a second amendment case. Some of the lower courts effectively refused to change their verdict. Those judges in inferior courts effectively said, “Catch me if you can,” to the superior courts. Those judges are a law unto themselves.

As I said, judges respond to the politics of their donors and the politicians who appoint them to higher office. These judges are willing to bend the law to advance their career or advance their personal biases. Honest citizens have responded with remarkable restraint. Where judges have abused the law and denied our rights, we’ve seen ordinary citizens simply ignore the abusive laws.

Honest citizens vastly outnumber the government officials who tell them what they can and cannot do. We’ve simply ignored the abusive laws that judges refuse to overturn.

We can argue if that undermines the rule of law, but there are other options. We have seen courts appoint special masters to supervise an administrative government body who refused to obey the law. We saw that happen with school administrators who refused to allow black children into public schools. We saw that again with police departments who systematically abused minority citizens. We’ve yet to see direct judicial intervention with states and localities who violate our right of self-defense. Even though we don’t see it covered in the corporate media, this isn’t a marginal legal issue. Armed defense is a human right that literally saves tens-of-thousands of lives a year. Despite the decades of abuse, I doubt the current court has the courage to say enough is enough and appoint special masters this time.

We’ve ignored unjust laws before. I expect history to repeat itself in Illinois. Honest citizens in Illinois will give the one-finger-salute to blue state legislatures that heaped new gun control laws on honest gun owners. As much as I’m a law and order kind of guy, I’m fine with that. We don’t always get the choices we want. Often our choices come down to selecting the lesser of two injustices. We will know by the end of the year. Unfortunately, I expect that neither the state legislators nor the courts will learn their lesson.

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