The Illinois State Police have stumbled badly in their efforts to approve instructors for the new Illinois Concealed Carry law.
With over 1,000 applications sitting in their offices, they’ve approved twenty-three as of a moment ago. Less than two dozen – and none in the last week!
They’ve approved exactly zero courses as well, so the less-than-two-dozen instructors have literally nothing they can teach.
People are beginning to ask if the Illinois State Police should be renamed the Incompetent State Police.
If they cannot handle approving 1,000 instructors in a timely manner, how in the heck are they going to handle the anticipated 300,000 applicants who are expected to apply within the first thirty to sixty days once applications are available?
At this rate, they aren’t; it’s going to be an epic failure by the Illinois State Police.
Here’s what we recommend to the Illinois State Police:
1. Get rid of the lawyers in your legal department or ride herd on them. They are the primary obstacle to common sense. The attorneys there are so risk adverse that they have paralyzed the entire process.
Now, our other recommendations:
2. Any approved curriculum should be able to be taught by any instructor.
3. Eliminate the requirements that have been artificially imposed by this emergency rule-making that aren’t in the Act itself.
Examples you ask? Requiring prints be submitted by Live Scan vendors instead of allowing local law enforcement to take prints either electronically or on print cards. The Live Scan fingerprinting, at fees of $55-85 per set, is unacceptable, particularly for poor Illinoisans. Even worse, there are no Live Scan vendors in a vast majority of Illinois counties!
Another? The ISP are requiring instructors have and maintain a concealed carry license to teach. Nowhere in the law is this required. ISP must scrap these artificial obstacles
3. Additional instructors need to be approved IMMEDIATELY.
4. Course approvals need to be granted IMMEDIATELY, for both generic 8- and 16-hour classes that are approved as well as other approved classes.
There’s only so much range space in IL and these approved instructors, teaching approved courses, need to get busy to handle a quarter-million people seeking training in the coming four months.
Under more minor points, but significant nevertheless:
5. Lawyers and law enforcement officers should be able to teach the use of force and current law under the supervision of a certified instructor.
6. The recently released mandates on curriculum, not included in the law itself, need to be scrapped.
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