The state police review every application and can automatically deny any applicant who does not follow application rules, pay appropriate fees or meet standard background requirements. A provision in the law also allows local police and other officials to object to a person's application after the applicant has passed a fingerprint background check and met the other requirements for a license.
The Concealed Carry Licensing Review Board, a panel with law enforcement backgrounds, considers the objections in private and is not required to explain the reasons behind its decisions except under order from a court, according to the state police's interpretation of the statute.
Apparently the statutory review process is ambiguous and makes it impossible for the state review board to inform applicants of the reason for their rejection. State Representative Brandon Phelps, an architect of the law, agrees that the law needs some tweaking:
"The problem is that we gave the review board the benefit of the doubt, and we didn't give them any rules to operate by," said Phelps. "Right now, they are too secretive, and that's not the way we wanted it. We wanted them to be an extra layer of security to make sure people who don't deserve a concealed carry license don't get one."
The Illinois State Rifle Association is quite obviously unhappy with some of the denials:
Richard Pearson, executive director of the Illinois State Rifle Association, a plaintiff in the NRA lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Chicago, said some of the denials are likely mistakes."A lot of people have been denied wrongly, perhaps because of mistaken identity, inefficient court records or records that weren't filled out properly," said Pearson. "We've got cases of people who never had an (domestic abuse) order of protection issued against them, but someone who had a similar name did. The purpose is to get all this straightened out and run things more accurately.
And gun control groups are seizing on the lawsuit as an example of what they perceive as the expansionist aims of gun rights supporters:
Some gun-control advocates, however, view the wave of lawsuits as an effort by pro-gun advocates to loosen restrictions in the state's concealed carry statute, which was hastily cobbled in the General Assembly after a U.S. appellate court struck down the concealed carry ban in December 2012. Law enforcement review was a compromise needed to get the law through the legislature, according to representatives from both sides who were involved in the debate.
"It's the NRA's game plan across the country. When there's not legislation pending, they file lawsuits," said Mark Walsh, campaign director for the Illinois Council Against Handgun Violence. "They never liked this part of the bill. But in a lot of communities, local law enforcement knows a lot more about whether someone should have a concealed carry permit. They know if they're going to someone's house every two weeks on a domestic violence call."
It's difficult to understand how simply informing an individual as to why his or her application was denied somehow undermines the input afforded local law enforcement regarding an applicant's fitness to carry a firearm. This claim strikes me as a bit of hyperbole from those that remain fundamentally opposed to the concealed carry law. Applicants should only be denied based upon the parameters for denial under existing law.
The lack of transparency in the review process should be fairly easy to fix as long as concealed carry opponents recognize that, based upon federal court decree and state statute, the right to concealed carry is now settled law in Illinois. And if there's a need to tighten the eligibility restrictions, so be it.
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