The law in Illinois says the Illinois State Police are to process FOID applications in 30 days.
We’ll save you the time and trouble of following the link and finding the relevant section. Here it us: “The Department of State Police shall either approve or deny all applications within 30 days from the date they are received, and every applicant found qualified pursuant to Section 8 of this Act by the Department shall be entitled to a Firearm Owner’s Identification Card upon the payment of a $10 fee.”
The reality in Illinois is much different, particularly in light of record numbers of applications arriving each day at the Illinois State Police’s FOID application mailbox.
(Factoid of the day: Actually, a bank picks up the applications at the mailbox, pulls out the checks and forwards the apps to the ISP’s FOID section.)
The ISP, by its own admission, acknowledges they are running 64 days to process form. That’s what they are saying publicly, to the press.
CHICAGO (AP) – People applying for Illinois Firearm Owner’s Identification cards are waiting more than 60 days as the State Police experience one of its busiest months ever processing applications, spokeswoman Monique Bond said Tuesday.
More than 70,000 FOID card applications have been received in March, Bond said, putting it on track to be the record month so far for the program.
Every month since December has seen a record number of Illinois residents applying for FOID cards. Officials say 31,249 applications were received in December. In January, 61,172 people applied for a card, and there were 56,078 applications in February. State officials noted that at the end of January the backlog on processing FOID cards was more than 70,000.
However, the state police’s contention that applicants have to wait 64 days for a card is disputed by Greg Tropino Sr., president of GAT Guns in East Dundee. He told The (Elgin) Courier-News that he is hearing from his customers that it is taking them 10 to 15 weeks to receive a FOID card that gun owners in Illinois are required to have. Tropino says the cards are supposed to be in the hands of gun buyers in 30 days or less.
Gun owners are contesting that, some claiming a four month or greater wait, and they’ve got the cancelled checks to prove it.
In our opinion, it’s high time to eliminate the Firearms Owners Identification Card if the State of Illinois is so mismanaged that it cannot process them as required by law.
After all, a right delayed is a right denied, as Martin Luther King once noted.
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