So, I have some contacts in academia (economists and social statisticians) who are former clients of mine. They've been running ongoing studies that track and measure firearm ownership, carrying, and use since the courts forced Illinois to allow concealed carry.
There are approximately 325,000 concealed carry licenses in Illinois active, and somewhere around 345,000 have been issued (including revoked, expired and not renewed, cancelled due to move out of state, and invalidated due to death of holder, et cetera). These numbers are for earlier this year, so they might not be perfectly accurate presently.
That's actually well above the early projections of the number of licenses, which was targeted at about 250,000 before it hit a plateau due to license renewal and application balancing out with deaths and move-outs of state of holders. So, that's excellent news!
However, the very important, and very chilling, figure is that it appears that due to the licensing scheme that Illinois has in place, with its costs, its dissuasive application gauntlet (such as being Darted), the extensive limitations on where legal carry is allowed, et cetera, somewhere in the neighborhood of approximately 500,000 applicants who would have sought a CCL in this state have decided that the financial, legal, or administrative burdens of doing so outweigh the benefit of being able to carry a firearm for self-protection.
Half a million people . . . HALF A MILLION residents of Illinois have been dissuaded from exercising a Constitutional right due to the hurdles and hoops and prohibitively expensive obstacles that the legislature has set up to make it as hard as possible to do so.
This is, as we all know, by design.
Additionally, somewhere in the range of 2,500 to 3,000 crime victims just this year were prevented from obtaining a concealed carry license, which may very well have allowed them to avoid being victimized. As well, since the beginning of 2014, when concealed carry licenses began being issued, approximately 12,000–15,000 total crime victims were prevented from getting a CCL, again, which may have allowed them to carry a firearm and protect themselves from being helpless victims of crime.
Furthermore, the demographics of those helpless victims are overwhelmingly (more than 95 percent) non-white, non-males, a large percentage of whom are below middle class.
So, to put it bluntly, the Illinois CCL is most likely to disarm the poor, minorities, non-straight, and non-male people, almost 20-to-1 times more than it will disarm a heterosexual, white, non-poor male. Incidentally, those populations are just about as more likely to be victims of crimes than straight, white, non-poor males.
Great law, ain't it?
I really am looking forward to these studies being published in the next several years, because that sort of information needs to be utilized as a weapon against the idiotic strictures that this state has imposed on its most law-abiding citizens with the express intent of infringing on their Constitutional right to bear arms.
Edited by ChicagoRonin70, 15 November 2019 - 11:03 PM.