Illinois gun control jihadists passed the so-called “Protect Illinois Communities Act” in the dead of night last January. The bill banned all manner of popular self-defense, magazine-fed, semi-automatic firearms, but it provided that existing owners could keep them if they registered them. That registration window closed December 31st with barely a 1% compliance rate.
Now, a Facebook post from attorney Tom DeVore alleges that Governor J.B. Pritzker has explored the concept of using an executive order to declare a state of emergency and demand those who registered those “naughty guns” to surrender them to law enforcement. Supposedly this would come on the heels of a high-profile mass casualty incident.
DeVore ran for attorney general in the Land of Lincoln in 2022, and lost. However, he did score the first restraining order blocking Pritzker’s precious gun and magazine ban until that was vacated this past fall. That suit is still pending, for now.
The post has a lot of folks talking and WICS covered it:
SPRINGFIELD, Ill. (WICS) — A Facebook post making the rounds is raising questions about the assault weapons ban registry and how the Governor might use it.
Thomas DeVore, an attorney with the Silver Lake Group, posted on Facebook that Governor Pritzker could issue an executive order declaring an emergency should there be another mass shooting. That post has been shared almost 450 times.
DeVore’s post says “His executive order would be that all owners of the banned weapons who are on the registry would have to turn them over to the government.” “He told us he heard this information from colleagues who “have the ability to understand what’s going on within the inner circles of legislative leaders and the governor’s office.”
DeVore could not tell us which colleagues he was referring to.
“It was a phone call that I had with them a couple of days before I made that post.” “The conversation developed, as I’ve been told is that the governor’s people have already drafted some language for an executive order under the Illinois Emergency Management Agency Act,” he said.
We reached out to the Governor’s office. They told us the post was “Unequivocally false”.
While the governor’s office might have declared the post “unequivocally false,” it nevertheless aligns with another leak received by Guns Save Life last fall. In that leak, the governor’s people had gamed out introducing legislation in the aftermath of a high-profile “mass shooting” to require those who registered naughty guns to surrender them within a short time period. Ninety days was mentioned at the time. Legislative allies of the governor would introduce the bill (likely as a gut-and-replace amendment in a shell bill), then legislative leaders would fast-track the bill and get it to the governor in the matter of days.
Those who fail to surrender their registered guns would likely face felony charges and potentially police knocks on their door as well.
The executive order plan also fits with J.B. Pritzker’s love of using emergency executive orders to seize extraordinary powers. He did so with a series of emergency orders related to COVID, and now he’s doing much the same with the illegal alien influx into the Prairie State. What’s one more emergency order in the mix? Especially when few if any have the ability to block his edicts.
Stay tuned.