The whole premise of a mother-may-I approach to licensing activities like owning and carrying firearms is that the powers that be will honor the documents of those lucky enough to receive permission after agreeing to pretend that their rights are privileges. If, instead, officialdom laughs at the licenses it issues and penalizes people foolish enough to take them seriously, there’s no point submitting to the humiliating process of begging indulgence from government officials to begin with.
This brings us to the trend of Chicago police arresting legal gun owners, even though they possessed and showed documents allowing them to own and carry firearms.
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“An investigation by CBS News Chicago uncovered several times where police stopped Black gun owners for minor traffic violations and then charged them with felonies – even though they had legal firearm licenses,” the station’s Dorothy Tucker and Samah Assad reported October 20. “The findings prompted a rebuke from the National African American Gun Association. The ordeal also led to an exhausting toll and financial strain on the drivers. They had valid firearm licenses, but because of their arrests, spent months fighting to get charges dropped and expunged from their records.”
One of the cases cited in the story is that of Louis McWilliams, the 46-year-old owner of a cheesecake bakery. On his way to a business meeting, police pulled him over for a missing front license plate (while the reason isn’t mentioned in the story, license plate thefts are an ongoing problem in Illinois). According to CBS News, “police body camera video shows that after the police stopped him, the first thing he did was tell the officers he had a gun in the car.” He also presented his Firearm Owner Identification (FOID) card and a concealed carry license (CCL), which CBS News confirmed as valid.
But Chicago police claimed they couldn’t find his CCL in the Illinois State Police-run LEADS database. This shouldn’t be surprising to anybody who has ever dealt with government records systems and their inevitable unreliability. That may be why “a spokesperson with the state police would not comment on specific cases but said if an officer is unable to check the status of a FOID or CCL in LEADS, ‘the officer should not take any law enforcement actions as it relates to a potential FOID/CCL violation.'”
But Chicago police ignored the valid FOID, the valid CCL, and the guidance to respect the documents and ignore the database’s shortcomings. McWilliams was arrested, held in jail for a day, and charged with a felony. Charges were eventually dismissed, but his business suffered because of the missed meeting and his absences while he fought bogus charges. He still awaits the return of his gun.
CBS News notes Chicago police and Cook County prosecutors refused to be interviewed. What do they care? The damage has already been done to McWilliams and to other victims who tried to jump through the law’s hoops and found government officials unwilling to abide by their own rules.
“This shows that no matter how much you follow a system of which they create, they can still deem you wrong,” McWilliams said.
“Outrage. Anger. Frustration. Not again,” Phil Smith, president of the National African American Gun Association, responded to the Chicago police violations. “Those are the conversations and statements that are going in my head when I hear about another black person being stopped illegally, being arrested illegally, when they’ve had all their stuff together.”
The CBS story focuses on black gun owners receiving the brunt of abuses of authority by Chicago police and prosecutors when it comes to their self-defense rights. Race may be a major factor, or it may not be important at all, or it may be one factor on top of general government hostility to private gun ownership in some jurisdictions.
In 2023, Pascal Sabino of Injustice Watch, which monitors the Cook County court system, reported that Chicago police searching for illegal firearms “made hundreds of thousands more stops than they reported to state regulators” and in the process “even in their best year, police found guns in just 0.6 percent of stops.” Sabino also found legal gun owners who were arrested and had to fight to get charges dropped. It’s easy to imagine cops frustrated by finding more broken taillights than armed gangsters pushing the limits of their authority to satisfy their superiors.
As CBS News added, “it’s nearly impossible to know how many drivers are wrongfully charged with unlawful gun possession, only to have the charges dismissed.” The reporters found several other cases “including two lawsuits, accusing police of violating the rights of legal gun owners in similar situations.”
Doug Mayhall, president of the Illinois State Rifle Association, adds: “What’s happening in Chicago right now should outrage every single one of us. When licensed citizens are arrested while violent criminals roam free, it exposes a deep rot in our justice system. A system that’s been corrupted by politics and driven by anti-gun ideology under Democrat leadership in Chicago.”
This is the problem with turning rights into privileges to be exercised only with permission dispensed by the government. What the government gives, it can take away. What the government turns into a revokable concession, it can hem in with arbitrary rules and conditions. Ultimately, the government can ignore its own “generosity” and decide on a whim that people aren’t entitled to the privileges they’ve been granted. Then we end up suffering if we’ve run afoul of powerful people.
There are “fundamental problems with the Permission Society,” Timothy Sandefur, the author of The Permission Society: How the Ruling Class Turns Our Freedoms into Privileges and What We Can Do About It, wrote in 2017. “One of them is that it violates the principle of equality. Who has to ask permission? An inferior has to ask permission of a superior. Slaves have to ask permission. Children have to ask permission. Until recently, women had to ask permission—to own property, get jobs, sign contracts, and so forth. To have to ask permission from someone else typically means flattering or appeasing that person, rather than being treated as equal citizens.”
Chicago cops shouldn’t try to meet demands to get guns off the streets by arresting people who have jumped through all the hoops to get permitted and licensed to own and carry firearms. But nobody should have to ask the government’s permission to own a firearm or do anything else. Government officials like cops and prosecutors are supposed to work for the public, not flaunt their arbitrary power. And, as they’ve demonstrated with Chicago gun arrests, they aren’t morally superior to anybody.
