West Central Reporter

House Rep. C.D. Davidsmeyer (R-Jacksonville) is frustrated with the length of time it's taking gun owners to receive their Firearm Owners Identification (FOID) cards.

He said he recently asked Google ‘how long does it take to get a FOID card’ and “it came up 127 days.”

“Now that was as of March 5,” he said. “I think that was the most recent number they had, but they're still way behind.”

The assistant Republican leader also talked about helping a constituent who has been waiting for his FOID card for 13 months and said it was “absolutely crazy.” But what bothers him most is how people from other states can purchase ammunition in Illinois but there are a lot of local stores that refuse to sell ammunition to people who have expired FOID cards.

“We are second-class citizens in our own state and ... that FOID card follows us to all the other states,” Davidsmeyer said. “This is an impediment to exercising our Second Amendment rights.”

While he appreciates the work the state police do, he said that they can’t handle the program.

“The only answers they’ve come up with ‘maybe we should charge more for it and maybe we should make people apply more often’ and from my point of view if you apply more often, your backlog is going to get longer so we need to step up," he said. “We have options on what we can do. We need to step up and make changes. These are obvious things, all the things that we're talking about today are substantive things that we can actually accomplish now. We can move forward and try to fix these programs so that they actually work.”

State Sen. Neil Anderson has been advocating to repeal the Firearm Owners Identification (FOID) Act and has filed Senate Bill 1754. The bill has been left pending at the Senate.

He dubbed the act as a “cash grab for the state.”

The slow pace has caused law-abiding owners to be indignant.