SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — With the stroke of his pen, Governor JB Pritzker made Illinois the ninth state to ban assault-style weapons.
The governor and supporters of the measure say the passage is long overdue.
“Today, I couldn’t be prouder to say that, ‘we got it done,’” Pritzker said. “We got this done for all the victims. The spouses, the children, parents, friends, and loved ones who are no longer with us, and for those who have survived mass shootings.”
Passing gun legislation is never easy. After a private battle that lasted for days, Democrats, who control the legislature, moved forward. Pritzker’s signature comes after the Illinois House voted to pass an assault weapon ban. The 68 to 41 vote took place after the Senate approved an amended bill on Monday that bans the sale, delivery, and purchase of assault-style weapons.
Owners of such guns can keep them, but they must register them with state police by Jan 1. Failure to do so is a misdemeanor and then a possible felony for subsequent offenses.
Also, the sale of large-capacity ammunition magazines — more than 10 rounds for long guns and 15 rounds for handguns — are banned.
Illinois State Police will be allowed to update the ban list periodically.
Before the vote, Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch claimed victory.
“It’s time that we protect Illinois communities. It’s time that we protect Illinois families,” he said.
Republicans rallied against the measure calling it unconstitutional.
“Unfortunately, this bill again is not going to stop gun violence. It is not going to protect our most vulnerable neighborhoods or our most vulnerable children,” said Illinois Rep. Toni McCombie.
“We have constitutional rights in our country. They protect our freedoms from the government. They are not rights that are given to us by the government,” added Illinois Rep. Patrick Windhurst.
The lone Republican ‘yes’ came from outgoing House Minority Leader Jim Durkin, who said he hoped his vote would honor the mass shooting victims at Highland Park’s Fourth of July parade.
A French hospital was partially evacuated Saturday after a senior citizen arrived with a World War I artillery shell lodged in his rectum.
The 88-year-old patient visited Hospital Sainte Musse in Toulon to have the antique explosive removed — but instead sparked a “bomb scare,” French publication Var-Matin reported.
“An emergency occurred from 9 p.m. to 11:30 p.m. on Saturday evening that required the intervention of bomb disposal personnel, the evacuation of adult and pediatric emergencies as well as the diversion of incoming emergencies,” a hospital spokesperson stated.
“We had to manage the risk in a reactive framework,” the rep added. “When in doubt, we took all the precautions.”
Oh, shell no! The WWI relic measured almost 8 inches long and more than 2 inches wide.Twitter / @acommonlawyer
Bomb disposal experts at the scene determined there was little possibility the shell would explode inside the man.
“They reassured us by telling us that it was a collector’s item from the First World War, used by the French military,” the hospital stated.
Stunned doctors subsequently began the process of trying to remove the object — which measured almost 8 inches long and more than 2 inches wide — from the man’s rectum.
“We had to manage the risk in a reactive framework,” a hospital spokesperson declared. “When in doubt, we took all the precautions.”Hôpital Sainte Musse
It’s believed the pervy patient inserted the item up his anus for sexual pleasure.
“An apple, a mango, or even a can of shaving foam, we are used to finding unusual objects inserted where they shouldn’t be,” one doctor declared. “But a shell? Never!”
Medics were forced to take the elderly man into surgery, cutting open his abdomen in order to remove the relic.
According to the hospital, he is now in “good health” and is expected to make a full recovery from the surgery.
A New York Times conference featured a bank CEO pushing the financial industry to track Americans making purchases at retailers and monitor their “suspicious activity” under the guise of “reducing gun violence.”
Amalgamated Bank CEO Priscilla Sims Brown was the special guest at the Times’ DealBook confab and was interviewed by Andrew Ross Sorkin. He’s the Times’ columnist who previously proposed the gun buying monitoring scheme and spelled out the “next steps” in a column highlighting Sims Brown’s efforts after an international financial standards board adopted her petition to create the tracking codes.
Putting even a little thought to the idea reveals the serious flaws of the plan. Implementing the enormous system to track the private financial transactions will create a myriad of privacy and civil liberty concerns and no doubt is ripe for abuse.
Gun Control Dragnet
Sims Brown lobbied the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) to create a gun-related Merchant Category Code (MCC) for credit and debit card companies to use to track cardholders’ purchases of firearms and ammunition. The ISO adopted the proposal and banks are beginning to use them. Listening to Sims Brown forecast what’s ahead, her true gun control aim is revealed. It’s a dragnet for law-abiding Americans.
“We’re at the very early stages of this –,” Sims Brown told Sorkin and the audience. “But as this is implemented, those scenarios will be used.”
By “those scenarios,” she means “detection scenarios” in which a particular purchase prompts a bank to file a Suspicious Activity Report to the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. Here’s how the MCC tracking will reportedly work. Purchases made at retailers selling firearms or ammunition would be assigned the new code for purchases. The MCC won’t identify what is in the customer’s basket, so it could be a total purchase for a firearm and several boxes of ammunition. It could also include a new tent, sleeping bag, propane stove, waders, decoys, blinds and other outdoor gear. The total cost could be flagged as “suspicious” since it might be an outlier on a customer’s purchase history. That doesn’t make it nefarious, though.
Media reported the proposal won’t have its intended effect. “The payment network and its banking partners would have no idea if a gun-store customer is purchasing an automatic rifle or safety equipment,” Bloomberg News reported. Banks aren’t saying what purchases would be “suspicious.”
Just a Steppingstone
The MCC scheme has caught the attention of Congressional gun control politicians. Legislation has been introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives, H.R. 5764, by Reps. Madeleine Dean (D-Pa.) and Jennifer Wexton (D-Va.) and in the U.S. Senate, S. 3117, by Sens. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). That legislation, The Gun Violence Prevention Through Financial Intelligence Act, would provide banking institutions the cover they need to track purchases by requiring the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network to provide “guidance” needed to institute the MCC.
“Financial institutions have a legal obligation… to have programs in place to help detect and report suspicious activity, but they have to know what they are looking for,” Rep. Wexton said.
Rep. Dean has praised the back door gun control effort, too. “Financial institutions already have proven systems in place to identify suspicious behavior and purchasing patterns,” she wrote in a release.
Still no one has offered what “suspicious behavior” or “purchasing patterns” would be flagged. The questions are endless, answers few and the threat to Constitutional rights high.
Trudging Ahead. Trampling Rights.
Sorkin hypes his work in getting the MCC code established. He told the Dealbook audience, “This is an emotional topic for me in many ways… because back in 2018 I started writing about the role of guns in our society… and the role of credit card companies and banks in financing mass shootings.”
Sorkin stated his belief that lawful firearm retail businesses and the already-highly regulated Federal Firearms Licensees (FFLs) which provide for the legal exercise of the Second Amendment should do their part to create the backdoor database of gun buyers – something Congress is prohibited by law from doing on their own.
“Merchants must start using the code, and not obfuscate transactions by using other classifications,” Sorkin wrote. “Most crucially, the payments industry needs to develop and refine software algorithms for identifying suspicious activity…”
There are those words again – “suspicious activity.”
The suspicion is better reserved for those who would compile lists of Americans lawfully exercising their Constitutional Second Amendment rights. The right to keep and bear arms begins with the ability to make a purchase at the retail counter. Financial industry power players, though, are twisting their roles to facilitate legal transactions into social credit scores that put Americans on secret watch lists.
The financial industry doesn’t need to be suspicious of gun buyers who already are subject to FBI National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) verifications. This move, though, is reason enough for Americans to be suspicious of “woke” banking CEOs doing the bidding of gun control politicians.
Larry Keane is Senior Vice President of Government and Public Affairs and General Counsel for the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the firearms industry trade association.
——————————————————————————– Does anybody remember voting for this guy? I don’t! Grumpy
The mother was charged with putting the gun in the child’s sack before school.
MCMINNVILLE, Tenn. (WSMV) – A mother was arrested Monday after investigators say she “recklessly” put a loaded firearm into her child’s backpack.
The firearm was found in the backpack of a student at Hickory Creek Elementary School in McMinnville, Tennessee.
District Attorney Chris Stanford said in a media release the gun was loaded with 15 bullets. After investigating, deputies with the Warren County Sheriff’s Office said the incident was isolated and did not present further harm to the public. However, Stanford said the incident still put multiple people in danger.
The child’s mother, Kristen Holland, was charged with reckless endangerment with a deadly weapon.
“I want to praise the work of our school employees and school resource officers in a situation where their training and preparation led them to respond flawlessly,” said Warren County Director of Schools Grant Swallows. “We believe this was an isolated event with no intent to harm, but regardless, we take all instances with extreme and abundant caution. Because of the work of our staff and the Warren County Sheriff’s Department, our students were never in danger and the situation was resolved quickly.”
Parents and staff were notified of the incident. No lockdown procedure was ever initiated because no imminent threat was ever determined, Swallows said.
