‘I hope people call me insane…’
(Kaylee McGhee, Liberty Headlines) Illinois lawmakers have introduced a bill that would allow law enforcement to search gun buyers’ social media accounts before they can be approved for a firearm license.
The radical bill was authored by state Rep. Daniel Didech, D-Buffalo Grove, who said there are many examples of armed mass murderers posting graphic images online, like Nikolas Cruz, who killed 17 people at a high school in Parkland, Fla., last year.
In defending the bill, Didech invoked an entirely separate issue, mental-health awareness, while doing little to explain how it would pertain to gun-ownership rights.
“A lot of people who are having mental health issues will often post on their social media pages that they’re about to hurt themselves or others,” Didech said. “We need to give those people the help they need.”
He seemed to anticipate and welcome the backlash, though, claiming that he was representing the will of his constituents.
“I hope people call me insane,” Didech said in a Facebook post. “This is something my community is demanding action on.”
Illinois’s gun laws are some of the strictest in the nation—many conservatives believe they are in part to blame for escalating, uncontrollable violence in the Chicago area—but this law would be an even greater encroachment on gun rights.
“Ridiculous, just stupid,” Doug Schmidgall, owner of Aim 2 Shoot, told local ABC News affiliate Channel 20. “That’s an invasion of privacy. They shouldn’t go looking for trouble.”
Schmidgall said this bill would only affect lawful gun owners who want to purchase new firearms, not criminals who seek to misuse them.
“There’s not a new law out there that any criminal is going to affect. They are not going to pay attention to them, they are not going to turn their guns in or get rid of them, These politicians are just idiots,” Schmidgall said.
Even the leftist American Civil Liberties Union opposes the bill. ACLU Illinois’s Rebecca Glenberg said the bill “doesn’t say anything about how that list will be retained and for how long and what uses it might be put to.”
“A person’s political beliefs, a person’s religious beliefs, things that should not play a part in whether someone gets a FOID card,” she told Channel 2, a local CBS News affiliate.
