Pritzker: State Should "Limit" Assault Weapons
A woman fires a rifle at a downstate gun range. Governor JB Pritzker said Tuesday he wants to limit assault weapons in the state.
On the heels of mass shootings in Colorado and Atlanta, as well as continued gun violence in some Chicago neighborhoods, Governor JB Pritzker Tuesday called for the legislature to send a gun reform bill to his desk.
Speaking at a news conference in Springfield, Pritzker says he supports banning assault weapons.
“We ought to limit assault weapons. We ought to define them properly and then limit the ones, particularly, ones that are repeating where you’ve got bullets that are firing multiples of them in milliseconds, or within a second,” Pritzker said. “Those are things that we’ve gotta do away with. Those are for no other use but for killing masses of people.”
Most ArmaLite style rifles are semi-automatic, which requires a pull of a trigger to fire a round. “Bump stocks,” which uses recoil to make a semi-automatic weapon fire like an automatic weapon, were banned by the federal government in 2019.
“The vast majority of people who own those [guns], do so without ever committing any violent crimes,” said Rep. Patrick Windhorst (R-Metropolis), who was State’s Attorney in Massac County on the southern tip of Illinois for 14 years, could only recall a couple of instances in his county where a crime was committed with a semi-automatic rifle. “The issue we have to deal with is the causes of violent crime, not inanimate objects. The other efforts that have been taken to limit gun ownership and possession, particularly in the city of Chicago, have not been shown to reduce gun violence. I think we need to look at the issue from a different angle, which is, how do we address the root causes of violence? I’m not gonna stand here and say I have all the answers to that, but I do know that the history of banning certain weapons has not been shown to reduce gun violence.”
Sen. Robert Peters (D-Chicago), who represents portions of the city’s south side, says gun violence in the city should be considered gun violence by everyone.
“Nobody, no matter where they live, should feel that they [don’t] have the dignity and safety they deserve, whether that’s a kid in a school, whether that’s someone walking down the street. What everybody wants is to know that when they go to the store, when they go to a party, when they go to the spa, that they’re going to have safety, that they’re going to be comfortable, and they don’t have to worry about someone coming in there with a gun,” Peters said. “This is going to be a big, tough battle, it always is when it comes to gun violence. Oftentimes, when we see gun violence and how we address it, we talk about it very differently. When it comes to gun violence on the south side of Chicago, it’s talked about very differently than an AR-15. The challenge is, we need to talk about this as gun violence. A mass shooting in Park Manor (the Chicago neighborhood) and a mass shooting in Boulder is a mass shooting no matter what. [This is] a crisis that impacts everybody in America.”
Most gun legislation introduced this spring has been by Republicans, attempting to repeal the Firearm Owners Identification licensing system, or FOID, which has been ripe with delays and frustrations for gun owners across the state.
A bill sponsored by Sen. Omar Aquino (D-Chicago) would ban assault rifles that aren’t registered with the Illinois State Police. Windhorst says he believes the legislation, if passed, would be found unconstitutional.
But, Pritzker says recent violence will prompt action.
“There’s a lot of discussion that’s gone on behind the scenes during my entire term as Governor. I think that this will accelerate some of those conversations and I’m hopeful those discussions will lead to proposals to come forward and opportunities, perhaps, for me to sign legislation.”
