Illinois State Police Department breaks the law to advance agenda

As I mentioned a couple weeks ago, the Illinois State Police are trying to impose an arbitrary minimum age requirement for the issuance of a Firearm Owners Identification (FOID) card. A FOID, you may remember, is required in Illinois for purchasing, possessing, transporting, or using firearms or ammunition (the draconian tyranny of requiring the FOID in the first place is a discussion in itself). My post of a couple weeks ago included links to contact information for the legislative committee that has jurisdiction over these matters--Joint Committee on Administrative Rules (JCAR). The idea was to let JCAR know that this rule change does nothing to make Illinois safer, but only to subject Illinois residents to yet more regulation. I even expressed my gratitude that the ISP cannot implement this rule change unilaterally. I should have known . . .

It turns out that the Illinois State Police have decided to make an end-run around the entire legislative process, and do exactly what I thought they could not do (and which is illegal for them to do), and have stopped issuing FOID cards to qualified kids, because the law might change in the near future. Yep--the Illinois State Police Department is enforcing a law that is not on the books, but that the director ("Dirty Larry" Trent) wants to have passed.

Although adoption of such regulations is strictly within the purview of JCAR, an investigation conducted by the ISRA has revealed that Illinois State Police Director Larry Trent unilaterally established a minimum age for FOID applicants and began denying FOID cards to citizens less than 10 years of age as early as May 2007.

“Director Trent has taken it upon himself to nullify the authority of JCAR,” commented ISRA Executive Director, Richard Pearson. “Last May, he issued a declaration to the FOID division staff that directed the denial of FOID cards to applicants less than 10 years of age. Since that time, the State Police have used this bogus age limit as justification to deny over 200 applications. Of course, Trent’s edict has not stopped the State Police from cashing application fee checks.”

I wish I could say that I was surprised, but this being Illinois, it's par for the course.