A December 2012 federal court ruling overturning Illinois’ ban on carrying firearms in public set the stage for what has been a year-long conversation about guns in the state. The issue brought citizens, clergy members, victims’ family members, volunteer advocates and lobbyists to the Statehouse in droves to hold rallies, give speeches and testify before committees.
The General Assembly was able to pass compromise legislation to regulate the carry of firearms in the state, but the drama surrounding the process illustrated the degree to which gun control remains a polarizing topic throughout Illinois.
Valinda Rowe was one of many who made the trip to Springfield to advocate for her point of view on the issue. Rowe is the spokeswoman for IllinoisCarry.com, an all-volunteer group that advocates for Second Amendment rights.
Rowe, like many on both sides of the gun control issue, cites her personal experiences as key to her stance. “Growing up, I was raised in a home without firearms and my mother was very much against firearms, and so I was, too,” she says. But then she met her husband Mike Rowe, who enjoys target shooting. Mike taught her about gun safety and took her shooting. Once she got to know more, her apprehension dissolved and her opinions changed. “I’ve started from one end of the spectrum and ended up clear at the other.” But even at that point, Rowe says she was more interested in recreation than trying to change the law. “It’s a good time for my husband and I to go to the range and take a picnic and spend the day.”
Rowe says it was fear for the safety of her family that pushed her to advocacy. She says a mentally ill family member began threatening them. “It wasn’t just a one-time thing. This was a period of years of just kind of being in a terrifying situation.” Rowe says she reached out to several law enforcement agencies, but there was little they could do. She started looking into concealed carry laws and discovered that Illinois was one of the only states in the country that did not allow some form of carry. “If I lived just 20 minutes farther east, then I could protect myself,” says Rowe, who lives in southeastern Illinois near the Indiana border. That was when she decided to get involved in the push for carry in Illinois, and she connected with IllinoisCarry. “I wasn’t content to just discuss it. I wanted to see action.”
While Rowe and others are getting licensed to carry guns in the state, other Illinois residents are nervous about more guns being on the streets, especially in parts of the state that are already facing devastating gun violence.
Annette Nance-Holt’s 16-year-old son Blair was murdered in a 2007 shooting on a Chicago city bus. Michael “Mario” Pace, a teenage gang member, set out to kill a rival by shooting up a crowded bus. Blair Holt was not the intended target. He was an honor student on his way home from school and was shot while shielding a friend.
Nance-Holt and Blair’s father Ronald Holt, a Chicago police officer, joined with a group of other families who lost loved ones to violence and founded Purpose Over Pain. The organization contacts the families of victims and helps out in any way it can, including providing money for funeral arrangements, sometimes out of members’ own pockets. “We’ve had parents who did not have the money to bury their children,” she says. The group advocates for gun control. It is also working to address unsolved murder cases and is doing outreach to try to make neighborhoods safer on a block-by-block basis.
Homicides in Chicago dropped last year. The city logged 415 homicides in 2013, down from 503 in 2012. The number of shootings also dropped from 2,448 to 1,864. But Chicago’s homicide numbers are still bigger than the totals from the two larger cities in the country. New York had 333 homicides last year, and Los Angeles’ count was 250 as of December 28. Many of the homicides in Chicago were concentrated in a few neighborhoods, such as Englewood, South Shore, Austin, Roseland, Lawndale, Pullman and Auburn Gresham, while other parts of the city remained relatively untouched.
Illinoisans like Nance-Holt, who are trying to curb violence, and those who are working to advocate for the constitutional rights of gun owners generally agree on one thing. The violence problems in Chicago and other urban areas of the state cannot be blamed on guns alone. “I think that for way too long in those areas this issue has been portrayed as a gun issue, when I think it’s a socioeconomic issue. Tell me how we fix the failing school systems in those districts when you have a less than 50 percent graduation rate,” NRA lobbyist Todd Vandermyde said at a legislative hearing on concealed carry. “Tell me how you fix that the role model of the family is not a male who carries a lunch pail or a briefcase to work 40 or 60 hours a week. Tell me how you get young people who can have a job at something other than flipping burgers at McDonald’s, and they can work at a steel mill ... or some industry and earn a living wage, and I think those will go a long way toward solving a lot of the violence problems.”
Nance-Holt, a fire captain who lives on the south side of Chicago, says she has watched the decline of her neighborhood as jobs and opportunities followed the flight of white residents in the 1970s. “When all the white [residents] moved out of Roseland, all the businesses went with them.” She ticks off a laundry list of grocery stores, pharmacies and restaurants that have closed. Nance-Holt agrees with Vandermyde on several points. “The fact that you have households where the father is not in the household, that’s a big problem,” she says. “The breakdown of the family structure is definitely one of the problems. The second thing is a lack of jobs in the communities. You can’t make a living wage.”
After Blair Holt, 16, was murdered in a 2007 shooting on a Chicago bus, his parents co-founded Purpose Over Pain.
Credit WUIS/Illinois Issues
But when it comes to the role of guns in the violence, their points of view diverge. Vandermyde accuses politicians of using firearms as a scapegoat instead of addressing the more complex issues contributing to the violence. “I think they blame guns for all the problems that they can’t get their hands around. They have a violence rate that they can’t control, they have an educational system that’s failing that they can’t fix. They have jobs fleeing the city with industry that they can’t stem the bleeding on that. And so I think at the end of the day the easiest thing for them to do is to find a bogeyman — it may be a gun; it may be the NRA — and make us the patsy. Because they have failing polices that they can’t get a grip on.”
Nance-Holt says that the availability of illegal guns cannot be ignored as factor in the violence. “These kids tell me they can get a gun in five minutes,” she says. “That’s ridiculous.” She says Purpose Over Pain backs changes to the law that would not keep legal gun owners from having firearms but are geared toward clamping down on the illegal gun trade. The group supports requiring background checks for all gun sales, including private sales, and limiting the number of guns an individual can buy each month. The group also calls for more scrutiny of gun stores to ensure that they are following the rules.
She says it may be easier for some in the state to write off the violence happening in Chicago and other cities as gang members killing gang members. “‘Yeah, it’s black kids killing black kids. We really don’t care.’ They really don’t care about that.” But she notes that many victims, including her son, are innocent bystanders. And as for the young gang members, she says, “That’s somebody’s child, too.” Nance-Holt says gun violence has had a negative effect on people of all races and income levels living in both rural and urban areas. “It’s not just a black issue,” she says. “We should all be concerned about what’s going on, whether it be the city, the suburbs or downstate. We should all be concerned about guns ending up in the hands of those who shouldn’t have them.”
She respects the constitutional rights of gun owners, she says, but she says that people also have “the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and my child didn’t get that.” She asks: “If they’re good, law-abiding citizens, what is the problem with wanting to have reasonable restrictions on a dangerous weapon that could change your life some day like it changed mine?”
In 2007, U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush of Chicago introduced legislation named after Blair Holt that would have required a federal license for purchasing many types of guns and would have created a federal record of the sales of such guns. The bill, and another version introduced in 2009, languished in a House committee. Still, the well-documented desire of many gun control advocates for laws similar to Rush’s bill is one of the reasons those advocating for gun rights say they are unwilling to consider smaller issues. Rowe describes restrictions, such as private sale background checks, as a “foot in the door” for requiring gun owners to register all their firearms and future purchases with the government. At the same time, she dismisses new gun control laws, approved by Illinois lawmakers on the same day as concealed carry, as feel-good measures that will do little to stop criminals from obtaining guns.
The story of one Illinoisan, long-time gun journalist Dick Metcalf, seems to indicate that finding middle ground among the most vocal advocates on each side of the gun control issue, who are often unwilling to cede any points to the opposition, may be a nearly impossible task. After writing a column for Guns & Ammo magazine in which he said Illinois’ requirement of 16 hours of training for a concealed carry license was not an unconstitutional infringement on Second Amendment rights, Metcalf was fired from his posts as a contributing editor and host of a television show produced by Guns & Ammo parent company, InterMedia Outdoors.
Metcalf, who described himself in a recent interview with The New York Times as a “Second Amendment fundamentalist,” wrote in his column, titled “Let’s Talk Limits,” that “all constitutional rights are regulated, always have been, and need to be.” Backlash quickly followed. Readers wrote to the magazine saying that they planned to cancel their subscriptions, threatening emails poured in, and, according to Metcalf, two major gun manufacturers threatened to pull their advertising from the magazine if he was not let go. Metcalf said of the experience: “Compromise is a bad word these days. People think it means giving up your principles.”
Rowe, who teaches carry training classes, says she thinks the 16-hour requirement, the highest in the nation, is “excessive” because it increases the cost and time commitment that residents must exert to exercise a right that is enshrined in the Constitution. She says she worries that the training cost and the $150 fee for a license could “disenfranchise” residents of low-income, high-crime neighborhoods who want to carry a gun for protection.
“We are locked in a struggle with powerful forces in this country who will do anything to destroy the Second Amendment,” Richard Venola, a former editor of Guns & Ammo, told The New York Times. “The time for ceding some rational points is gone.”
The opinions that are most often voiced in the public debate over guns tend to be similar to either those of Rowe or Nance-Holt. Advocates on both sides of the issue are entrenched in a political battle that is often marked by a lack of trust between opponents. Many have lost family members or have lived in fear of a personal attack. In reality, there is also a relatively silent yet substantial group of Illinois residents who fall somewhere in between.
In a 2012 poll from the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute, the majority of respondents favored bans on large-capacity ammunition magazines, semi-automatic weapons and background checks for gun sales. However, more than 60 percent of those surveyed opposed a ban on handgun ownership. When asked if they prioritized “controlling gun ownership” or “protecting the right to own guns,” almost 60 percent said that controlling ownership was more important. The institute polled 600 registered voters from all over the state.
The Rev. Martin Woulfe’s father was a Marine and taught him how to shoot at a young age. “By the time I was 16, I was able to buy my first gun, which was a black powder reproduction.” Woulfe has since become a collector of historic weapons. He owns 19 guns and dresses in American Civil War historical garb to participate in shooting competitions with the North-South Skirmish Association. Competitors use muzzle-loading weapons. They make their own ammunition and pack their own gunpowder. “I am a student of history, as are many people who are in this particular sport,” he says. “We’re history junkies.”
Woulfe is a Unitarian Universalist minister in Springfield, who believes that shooting can be a “spiritual practice.” He has preached to his congregation about the “Zen” of shooting. “I have also preached about the consequences of gun violence,” he says. “I would contend gun violence is undermining our democracy.”
Woulfe supports gun ownership, but believes the emphasis should be on safety and responsible ownership. He says a focus on safety is part of the culture of historic gun competitions, where shooters use guns that are less predictable than modern weapons. “Safety is the No. 1 priority. Accuracy second, but safety is first,” he says.
He supports mandated training for all gun owners as well as limits to what kind of guns are available to the public. He does not support concealed carry and does not plan to seek a concealed carry license, but he says he understands why people would. However, he says he is dismayed by what he sees as the fear that he believes is driving the most extreme aspects of the debate. “I object to those who sell guns — who sell fear, who peddle paranoia, who want you to believe that society is on the verge of collapse, that law enforcement is a joke and that the only recourse for a sane, safe, sensible household — let alone society — is to arm yourself and to carry a gun, a loaded gun, by your side,” he said in a recent sermon. “I think we’ve lost our sense of proportion as we have been overtaken by fear.”
Illinois Issues, February 2014
