A bill sits and stares gun owners and dealers in the face as fall veto session and lame duck session approaches.
“I have one of these guns sitting on my counter for just under $9,000, so anybody that owns these…is the government going to give you your money back? They pick this one caliber and they get it passed. Is it going to be the .308 next? Where does it end?”asked Matt Garvin, a concerned guns dealer at Guns & Glory in LeRoy, Illinois.
A source within Illinois State Police tipped off Cities and said there is an “assault weapons ban” to be implemented the coming weeks. Cities contacted ISP and they said the bill’s sponsor and co-sponsors would have more information.
HB5522 looks to amend the Criminal Code of 2012. State Rep. Maura Hirschauer, D-Batavia, continues her fight to get “weapons of war” off our streets as a member of the new House Firearm Safety and Reform Working Group, a group created in the summer of 2022.
“I don’t think they really want to pass an assault rifle ban, on .50 calibers or otherwise, I think they want the political issue. You have people like Governor Pritzker and they pound their fists on the table and say we are going to go pass these bans…and even though they are in the super majority and hold the Governors office…these types of bills don’t move forward. Why? Because there are some Democrats who recognize they are not solving a problem with these bans,” said state Senator Jason Barickman.
Barickman said people who are strong proponents of the Second Amendment need to do their homework on these types of bills.
The bill looks to make it unlawful to “deliver, sell, or purchase or cause to be delivered, sold, or purchased or cause to be possessed by another, an assault weapon, assault weapon attachment, .50 caliber rifle, or .50 caliber cartridge.”
Guns dealer Matt Garvin said that is a huge bullet but these guns are 30 pounds and expensive, he also said that rarely are these the type of gun you’d see in a mass shooting.
The bullet is 5 inches long and a 1/2 inch thick.
Garvin said the average person doesn’t own a .50 caliber rifle. He takes issue with the term “assault weapon” and he said there is a definition of an “assault riffle.”
Garvin said assault rifles were banned for civilian use a long time ago. You have to have a special machine-gun license.
“The Libs can google it. Rifles for military-use that have three-way selector switch, which means as fast as you can pull the trigger it shoots a round, you flip it to the second position it would have a three-round burst. Then the third position makes it fully automatic you pull the trigger and it empties the magazine. Those are illegal already to any civilian in the US, unless you have a special license,” said Garvin.
Deadly shooting happen daily in Chicago. Jason Barickman said they’ve got some of the strictest gun laws in the state.
However there are stories like this one, that are missed…. a 23-year-old woman with a concealed-carry permit defended herself against four armed men who attempted to carjack her last week on the South Side of Chicago.
