(WBBM NEWSRADIO) — Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart says a new report shows how critical it is to get guns out of the hands of Illinois residents banned from having them and how much the current system is failing.
“I don’t need to talk about how tragedies can occur. Tragedies already have occurred,” Dart said.
He says the report, titled “A Firearm Regulation Crisis” shows that nearly three out of every four Illinoisans with revoked FOID cards have not turned over their firearms or cards to authorities.
“The largest category of the 85,000, about 32,000 are revoked because of a felony indictment. I think we can all agree that we don’t want that person around a gun. Thirty-thousand are people with a mental health issue. And then 27,000 are people that have an order of protection against them,” Dart said.
To help address the issue, and train more law enforcement officers in retrieving some of those guns, Dart is proposing between $8 million and $10 million in new funding from state lawmakers, money that would be distributed to sheriff’s offices across Illinois.
“For over a year, we’ve been meeting with every group that you can imagine, everyone knows what we’re up to here, everyone knows that we’re doing something quite unusual. We’re pitching to get money for someone else, but we just need to do this,” Dart said.
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