Illinois State Police Director Brendan Kelly speaks at a City Club of Chicago event on Wednesday. [City Club of Chicago] 

Illinois lawmakers have passed several bills in recent years designed to combat the proliferation of illegal firearms used in crimes in Illinois. Those laws are having an effect, Illinois State Police (ISP) Director Brendan Kelly said.  

Kelly addressed the City Club of Chicago on Wednesday alongside Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) Chicago office Special Agent in Charge Christopher Amon and University of Chicago Crime Lab Director of Programs Kim Smith for a discussion on what Illinois law enforcement is doing to stem the flow of illegal guns.  

Kelly pointed to new laws in Illinois regulating gun sales and expanding ISP’s regulation of Federal Firearm License (FFL) dealers. A law that took effect in 2019 gave ISP regulatory power of FFL dealers. Kelly said that law put many gun dealers out of business as they declined to go through with ISP’s licensing and inspection process. Prior to the law, Kelly said Illinois had more than 2,000 FFL dealers. Today, Illinois has less than 1,000 dealers and ISP inspections rarely find problems at the dealers.   

“The ones that are not FFLs anymore, they simply made a choice that they are not willing to abide by those regulations and they’ve gone elsewhere, they’ve gone out of business,” Kelly said.   

It’s still not always easy to measure how effective particular policies are, Kelly said, because there are many sources of illegal guns, and guns recovered by police may have gone through multiple channels. That’s also why it’s not as easy to trace guns as TV shows make it look, Amon said. He said it takes up to two weeks to trace a gun in a process that involves multiple phone calls to manufacturers and sellers where transactions of the gun have been recorded.  

Illinois also continues to deal with the problem of out-of-state guns, Smith said. University of Chicago data from 2013 to 2016 shows 60 percent of guns recovered by Chicago Police came from outside of Illinois, including 21 percent from Indiana, Smith said. Chicago Police have also been recovering on average more shell casings at crime scenes, which is likely attributed to the increase in switches for guns that modify the gun’s firing akin to a machine gun.   

Another bill that’s working well is the Fix the FOID BIO bill approved in 2021. One requirement of that law was the establishment of databases at ISP on stolen guns. Kelly said that law allows people engaged in a person-to-person transfer to check that a person’s FOID card is valid and make sure that the gun they are buying isn’t stolen.  

Kelly emphasized this tool means that people need to report stolen or lost firearms right away and not making excuses later when police inquire about what happened to a gun involved in a crime.  

“There really is no excuse now for someone who is selling a firearm to say that I didn’t know where this firearm went,” Kelly said.   

The challenge for prosecutors is that people can claim they didn’t know the gun was stolen and it is difficult to prove the person was lying, Kelly said. He added he would like to see legislators clarify the law so that if the gun shows up in the stolen gun database, a person should be liable for having knowledge the gun was stolen.   

“This is one of those inches we’ve got to close to make it easier so that when people do have their firearm stolen, they are reporting it and that can be put in the database and it’s easier to show that someone is possessing that for criminal purposes,” Kelly said.  

Kelly declined to weigh in on a proposal to strengthen Illinois’ gun storage laws, but Amon said as a gun owner himself, it is reasonable to require people to take extra steps to make sure their guns are inaccessible to anyone not permitted to have one.  

“I think anything that strengthens those types of laws will have that effect of people thinking twice of how they store their firearms,” Amon said.