The Right's Latest Tactic on Gun Laws? Just Don't Enforce Them
In early 2018, while survivors of the deadly Parkland school shooting in Florida were leading a renewed push for gun control across the country, a counter-movement was brewing in Illinois. Officials in rural Effingham County, a few hours downstate from Chicago, were looking to protest a spate of proposed firearm restrictions being considered by state lawmakers, and came up with a provocative resolution: The county declared itself a “Second Amendment Sanctuary” and threatened not to enforce new laws it viewed as a violation of Americans’ gun rights.
“Rural parts of America feel like the big city elites are slowly infringing upon what we see as our God-given right,” Bryan Kibler, the Effingham County state’s attorney who came up with the idea, told me in a recent interview. “There have been a lot of things that have upset us, but this seems to be the one that we draw the line on.”
Illinois’ urban-rural political divide is particularly pronounced in Effingham, a mostly white county of 30,000 that Donald Trump won by six points in 2016, even as the state as a whole went to Hillary Clinton by nearly 17. What set off their protest was five bills that had been under consideration by Illinois lawmakers, including proposals to ban bump stocks and high-capacity magazine clips and to raise the age limit of firearm ownership from 18 to 21. The legislation seemed reasonable enough — and even a self-described “hard right-wing guy” like Kibler says that there are certain restrictions, like those on convicted felons possessing guns, that he agrees with. But Kibler views the situation as “knuckleheads” in Chicago imposing their will on those who live outside the metropolitan area.
Effingham’s resolution — a subversive nod to the sanctuary laws passed in liberal cities that do not participate in federal immigration enforcement — was mostly a “symbolic” measure at first, Kibler says, as much about getting under the skin of those “big city elites” as anything else. But in the year since its passage last April, the “tongue-in-cheek” protest has developed into a movement, spreading like wildfire across the state and the country. More than half of the counties in Illinois have declared themselves gun sanctuaries. Jurisdictions in at least 12 other states, from North Carolina to Oregon, have either enacted or are considering such public declarations. Some states have seen an especially feverish spread of the movement, such as in Oregon, where far-right militia groups like the Oath Keepers have taken up the charge, and in New Mexico, where a majority of its 33 counties have adopted such resolutions.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/second-amendment-sanctuaries-nra-839552/
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