Chicago City Wire

Sales of firearms in Illinois spiked with the onset of the Covid lockdowns and the Chicago riots over the summer of 2020, and again late last year, just before the SAFE-T Act with its cashless bail system, went into effect in the new year.

Mandi Sano of the Illinois Gun Rights Alliance said that sales of firearms and ammo statewide reflected a stunning jump nationally of 450 percent after the lockdowns went into effect. (Firearm dealers were considered essential business in Illinois and so remained open during the lockdowns).

“Then the summer of 2020 that brought the ‘mostly peaceful protests’ continued the increased sales,” she told Chicago City Wire in an email.  “We saw a lull in sales late in the first quarter of 2021 that leveled out until 4th qtr 2022. The Illinois Safety Act (SAFE-T) was supposed to take effect Jan 2023. Then we saw an increase in sales probably a 40% jump that last just through the 4th qtr 2022.”

Records kept by the Illinois State Police show that in just one year, from February 2022 to January 2023, the number of FOID (firearm owner’s identification card) applications jumped from 10,665 to 15,408 and the number of new concealed carry fingerprint licenses increased from 1,279 to 1,707.

A recent Wirepoints report noted that more Chicagoans are arming, attributing the trend to major crime jumping 41 percent from 2021 to 2022.

“Evidence of growing self-defense in Chicago is widespread,” the report said.

In February of this year, a “legal concealed carry permit holder held a home burglar in Wrigleyville until police arrived. The unemployed offender had been at large on two felony warrants.”

In late January, “an 80-year-old man on Chicago’s Northwest side used his legally-registered gun to shoot and wounded one of a pair of home invaders. The two had to seek treatment at a local hospital and were later arrested and charged. The victim was badly battered and hospitalized in critical care.”

“Without his weapon he might have been killed,” the report said.

Richard Pearson, Executive Director of the Illinois State Rifle Association, told Chicago City Wire that “there is no question” that concealed carry permit applications are going up in the city.

“All you have to see is the increase in car jackings and that there is no deterrent to it,” he said. “They are back out on the street before the paperwork is even done. It’s almost like they are being rewarded to do it.”

In 2013, Illinois was the last state in the nation to legalize concealed carry. The year before the U.S. Supreme Court declared an Illinois ban on possession unconstitutional.