As many as 30,000 guns may still be in the possession of Illinois residents deemed too dangerous to have them, according to a Tribune investigation.
In an analysis of data released for the first time, the Tribune found the state has repeatedly failed to ensure that people surrender their weapons and gun permits after their Firearm Owner’s Identification cards are revoked, resulting in the breakdown of a system put in place to deter gun violence.
In all, nearly 27,000 Illinois residents over the past four years have not informed authorities what they did with their guns after state police stripped their licenses, according to the analysis. That means law enforcement has no idea whether 78% of revoked cardholders since 2015 still possess guns.
The uncertainty has created a public safety risk that has been compounded for decades by antiquated policies and limited law-enforcement resources.
Among those with dismal compliance rates are residents convicted of domestic violence or people who had their cards rescinded because of mental health concerns, the Tribune analysis shows. About 3 out of 4 such revokees failed to tell the state where their weapons are, despite making a combined 5,000 serious inquiries about purchasing guns before the revocation.
The broken system was exposed in February, when a disgruntled employee opened fire at the Henry Pratt Co. warehouse in Aurora, killing five co-workers and wounding five officers before dying in a shootout with police. The gunman, a convicted felon named Gary Martin, had his FOID card revoked in 2014 but was never forced to relinquish the Smith & Wesson handgun he used in the shooting.
The Tribune’s analysis of closely held Illinois State Police data — including how often each rescinded cardholder had made a serious inquiry about purchasing a gun — shows that the failure by state and local authorities to follow up on the revocations and account for firearms is widespread and happening in every county in Illinois.
“I will say the depth and breadth of the problem did take me back just a bit,” said acting Illinois State Police Director Brendan Kelly, who has made revocation compliance a top priority since taking office earlier this year. “The only way we are going to be able to take a bite out of this problem is just laying it all out there: the good, the bad and the ugly.”
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According to the data released under an open records request, more than 34,000 people had their FOID cards revoked between 2015 and 2019 alone.
More than half kept their cards despite orders to relinquish them, meaning they could still buy ammunition with the card even though it could not be used to purchase a new weapon from a licensed dealer.
Before the Tribune finished its analysis, gun rights advocates predicted it would be a waste of time, insisting most people had their cards revoked simply because they moved out of state. In reality, less than 4% — or 1,332 of 34,221— lost their FOIDs for that reason.
Among other findings in the Tribune’s investigation:
* Domestic violence-related infractions are the most common reason for a resident’s card to be revoked, followed by mental health concerns and felony convictions.
* The state rescinded 10,527 FOID cards for domestic violence-related reasons, including battery convictions and orders of protection. Of those former cardholders, 81% have not accounted for any guns.
* The state revoked 10,067 FOID cards for mental health concerns, including voluntary and non-voluntary hospitalizations. The whereabouts of their firearms are unknown in nearly 3 of 4 cases.
* Of 157 Cook County residents who committed suicide with firearms in 2018, nine had revoked FOID cards.
* Chicago accounts for about half of the 10,382 revocations in Cook County. Orland Park and Schaumburg are second and third in the county with 151 and 145 revocations each.
* Among towns with more than 10,000 adults, Mount Vernon, Kankakee, Marion and Plainfield had the highest non-compliance rates in the state.
Failure to ensure compliance over so many years has resulted in a now-daunting backlog that would require a coordinated, costly effort to fix. A bill pending in Springfield proposes an increase in cardholder fees to fund a task force aimed at following up on revocations. The legislation also would require fingerprinting to obtain a FOID card, a mandate sponsors say greatly improves the likelihood of finding an applicant’s criminal background but opponents say is unconstitutional.
It faces strong opposition from gun rights advocates, who look at any change to current laws as an attack on the Second Amendment. Opponents of the bill promised legal challenges to the legislation should it pass because, they argue, the increased fee structure impedes the constitutional right to own guns.
Longtime gun rights lobbyist Todd Vandermyde said he believes revocations should be enforced, but it’s unfair to make law-abiding FOID cardholders pay for it.
“If this is a public safety measure foisted upon gun owners, then the state should pay for it,” he said.
While the advocates repeatedly have said they don’t want “bad people to have guns,” some dispute whether Illinois’ backlog of 27,000 non-compliant FOID card revocations actually poses a risk to the public.
“If you take away a mentally disturbed person’s gun, that doesn’t mean you would stop them from killing if that’s what they decided to do,” said Steve Balich, a Will County board member who has fought against new gun laws. “They could drive their car into a playground full of children just as easily. Do you want to take away their driver’s license too?”
National experts, however, believe the revocation database offers the state an unprecedented opportunity to prevent gun violence instead of simply responding to it. It also makes law enforcement more accountable because they can’t ignore the growing backlog any longer, said Cassandra Crifasi, deputy director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research.
“Part of that accountability,” she said, “means taking guns away from people we have decided are too dangerous to have them.”
A ‘convoluted mess’ — by design?
On one recent morning, dozens of white business envelopes arrived via the U.S. Postal Service at the Cook County sheriff’s office. Each contained a letter notifying Sheriff Tom Dart of a FOID card revocation, including the local resident’s name, address and reason for the rescindment.
This is how local police in Illinois learn about revocations in 2019. The cardholders also are informed of their suspensions the same way.
“I’d love (to say) these letters, these are the ones we found in a vault that came from the 1800s and back in the 1800s they put them on a pony and then they’d run around to different counties and drop these off,” Dart said. “No. This is how we are still doing it.”
Illinois is one of nine states that require gun owners to get a license before possessing a firearm. The application includes a criminal background check, though the federal databases used for the standard inquiry have significant gaps in information.
The cards cost $10 and expire in 10 years, but they can be revoked for several reasons, including felony convictions or indictments, convictions involving domestic violence, becoming the subject of an order of protection or being deemed a mental health risk. People who are dishonorably discharged from the military or determined to be in the country illegally also can have their licenses rescinded.
Those who receive revocation notices must surrender their FOID cards to their local police department within 48 hours and fill out a form stating their guns have been transferred either to police or to a legal gun owner.
Most police agencies fail to act on the letters, having neither the necessary officers nor the background information to make revocations a priority. The Cook County sheriff’s office has had a team dedicated to revocations since 2013 — a labor-intensive job that requires investigators to find out where the licensees used their FOID cards and confirm what weapons they’ve purchased so authorities know how many guns may be in play.
Critical to the police work is knowing revoked cardholders’ so-called FTIP (Firearms Transfer Inquiry Program) histories, which show how many times they have used their FOID cards to make serious inquiries about purchasing guns from federally licensed dealers. Though an FTIP doesn’t necessarily mean a sale was made, law-enforcement officials typically view it as a gun purchase.
Of the records examined by the Tribune, there were 30,816 FTIP statewide associated with revoked cardholders who failed to submit paperwork accounting for their firearms. In Cook County, that number was 6,644, including 3,023 in Chicago.
An FTIP, however, does not account for every gun obtained by a FOID cardholder. It does not include guns inherited or obtained in a private sale. It also doesn’t reflect if a purchase from a licensed dealer included more than one firearm, though law-enforcement officials say it remains a very strong indication of how many weapons a revoked cardholder owns.
Before the Pratt shooting, agencies would have to call Illinois State Police and ask for the FTIP information about those whose FOID cards were revoked. ISP has since made the data available to law enforcement via an internet portal.
Dart contends the process has been intentionally cumbersome and secretive, perpetuated by the lack of funding for enforcement and the outdated methods for sharing information. Local police agencies have been offered very little direction about how to retrieve cards or weapons, to the point where he doubts most of them realized it was their responsibility.
“This convoluted mess was not by accident. This was by design,” Dart said. “Everybody knew. Logical, thoughtful people knew very well this was a train wreck. But they were OK with that because underlying it, they wanted an ineffective gun system.”
ISP continues to send letters following the Aurora shooting, but it also has taken the unprecedented step of creating a massive database listing every revoked cardholder statewide. The information, which has been shared with most departments, includes the crucial FTIP information.
State police have made revocation history, including the reason, immediately available to officers making traffic stops, as well.
Kelly also intends to form regional task forces to help communities address their backlogs, creating an immediate legacy for the country’s largest mass shooting this year.
“There has been a BB gun solution to a .50-cal problem,” he said. “We’ve got to be doing better than what we are doing.”
Local law-enforcement agencies welcome the changes because the process can be daunting even for towns taking the most proactive measures. A week before the Pratt shootings, for example, the Joliet Police Department launched a new five-member unit that focuses on robberies, burglaries and FOID compliance.
In March, the department received two dozen revocation notices from Illinois State Police. Officers made sure all 24 revoked cardholders complied with the law and accounted for their guns using a time-consuming protocol similar to the Cook County sheriff’s office.
The city, however, still has 426 non-compliant revocations listed and as many as 470 unaccounted for guns, according to the statewide database. It would be nearly impossible for the department to erase the backlog on its own.
“We’re not getting a lot of help from the state on this,” Joliet police Sgt. Christopher Botzum said. “We’re doing this mostly on our own. It’s like everything has just fallen into our lap. We want to make sure that if we’re going to do it, we’re doing it right.”
A felon, a gun he shouldn’t have had, a mass shooting
Some two months after the Pratt shooting, Aurora police Chief Kristen Ziman sat in her office, having just received access to the database showing the backlog of non-compliant FOID revocations in her city. The data — which shows 329 of 381 revoked cardholders have not accounted for their guns — is the coda to the tragedy that rocked her town and her department, in particular.
On the afternoon of Feb. 15, warehouse worker Gary Martin opened fire after learning he would be fired. He fatally shot five co-workers and wounded five police officers and a union steward, using a Smith & Wesson handgun that he had legally purchased with a FOID card five years earlier.
Those killed were union chairman Russell Beyer; human resources director Clayton Parks; plant manager Josh Pinkard, forklift operator Vicente Juarez and college student Trevor Wehner, who had started his internship that day. Union steward Timothy Williams was seriously injured.
Martin died in a shootout with police.
As a convicted felon, Martin never should have been allowed to purchase the handgun used in the mass shooting. But he was able to do so after a background check using five distinct federal databases failed to show his 1995 felony conviction in Mississippi for choking his ex-girlfriend and beating her with a baseball bat, records show.
With his improperly acquired FOID card, Martin was able to purchase the Smith & Wesson handgun in 2014. His criminal history caught up with him later that year when he applied for a concealed carry license and provided his fingerprints to expedite the process. His prints flagged his conviction, prompting state police to deny the license and revoke his FOID card.
Ziman reiterated to the Tribune that Aurora has no record of receiving notice of Martin’s FOID revocation. But she also conceded that Aurora, like the vast majority departments, did not have a system in place at that time to follow up on most notices.
Because the notifications arrived “sporadically” and without an indication of whether the revokee had purchased firearms, it was hard to make the revocations a priority, she said.
Now armed with the revocation list, Ziman is developing protocols for prioritizing the more than 300 non-compliant revoked cardholders who live in Aurora.
Ziman said she does not want to send her officers on cold calls at the homes of former FOID cardholders without knowing what kind of weapons are waiting for them behind closed doors. She doubts a judge would grant a search warrant to enter a residence based on the sparse information included in the revocation notice.
“I am unwilling to do some knee-jerk thing, that we’re going to start knocking on doors right away and surrounding houses,” she said. “I am not going to put my officers in danger, number one, and two, we don’t know what we’re looking for: zero guns or an arsenal.”
Ziman acknowledges it’s unlikely her department — or any in Illinois — could get through the backlog with current resources. Her staff has been working with state lawmakers on the new gun legislation.
As the legislation works its way through the General Assembly, Aurora police intend to create a scale that will help officers prioritize the FOID revocations. Like most law-enforcement agencies making such determinations, Ziman’s department will concentrate on ensuring that residents who lose their FOID cards because of mental illness, violent crime or domestic violence account for their guns.
That’s exactly what one victim’s family wants to come out of the Pratt tragedy.
Vicente Juarez’s daughter, Diana, said she was stunned to learn after her father’s death that authorities didn’t enforce revocations as a matter of routine. She hopes tougher legislation and increased awareness will change that.
“We would love if the state just enforced the law,” she said. “Go knocking on doors and take away these guns from people who shouldn’t have weapons. That’s all we want.”
The Juarez family has filed one of two lawsuits against Illinois State Police for issuing Martin a FOID card and then failing to enforce its subsequent revocation. Both cases are still pending.
‘You never know’
On a rainy April morning, the Cook County sheriff’s revocation team crisscrossed the suburbs, armed with the names and addresses of seven revoked cardholders.
It’s unglamorous work for the seven-member unit, which also runs undercover operations and acts on real-time tips to intercept illegal guns. Still, they recognize the importance of the preventive police work.
“You never know,” Sgt. Chris Imhof said as the team traveled from Tinley Park to Orland Hills to Markham. “Any gun recovery you look at as, ‘If it shouldn’t be out there, you are doing your job.’ Whether it’s an Aurora thing or a guy selling guns, you never know.”
Armed with the new statewide database, Cook County investigators have been prioritizing the revoked cardholders by FTIP history. They initially focused on 34 non-compliant people who generated 10 or more FTIPs including a revoked cardholder in the suburbs who had inquired 79 different times about purchasing a gun.
Of the 34, investigators accounted for more than 50 firearms. They also arrested a suburban man, who has a federal conviction for removing serial numbers from guns, after he could not account for the whereabouts of eight weapons he purchased.
Some revoked cardholders told investigators they already turned in their paperwork, which authorities later confirmed. Oftentimes, though, investigators have to believe residents when they say they no longer have guns in their possession or have given them to someone with a valid FOID card.
While each door knock comes with some risk to the officers’ safety, departments with dedicated revocations teams — including Chicago and Joliet — say their biggest challenges are money and staffing. The Cook County sheriff’s office, for example, earmarks more than $500,000 for its revocation unit and still has a backlog.
Dart supports the pending legislation in Springfield — which could be voted on as early as this week — in part because it would increase funding for revocation teams statewide.
In the meantime, his department will continue to work its way through the 10,000 non-compliant revoked cardholders in its jurisdiction.
On that April morning, the team pulled onto a quiet Tinley Park cul-de-sac and knocked on the door of a brick home for a prearranged meeting. The resident invited investigators inside.
“Thankfully, we’ve never had any issues,” Imhof said. “Sometimes guys want to argue (that it’s) their right to bear arms. You just gotta talk to them.”
Five minutes after such a conversation, Investigator Todd Lukas walked out of the Tinley Park home with two boxes in his arms. A Ruger handgun was neatly tucked in each.
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