In an unusual and lengthy late-night statement, Illinois State Police on Thursday acknowledged lapses in the agency’s enforcement of the same gun license laws that possibly may have prevented a shooter from killing five people and injuring six others last week in Aurora.
Only one of every four people in the state whose firearm owner’s identification card was revoked last year properly notified police that they no longer had any weapons — and a minuscule number of owners were punished for not doing so, state police revealed in the statement.
Officials also said they have no record their agency told Aurora police of the 2014 revocation of the FOID card held by Gary Martin, the gunman in last week’s mass shooting. That acknowledgement from the state police, however, does not necessarily mean a letter was never sent to local law enforcement. Records of the sort are only kept for three years, the state police said.
The revealing statement — released almost a week after Martin opened fire at the Henry Pratt Company in west suburban Aurora — came as officials review what went wrong for Martin to have kept his weapon after his gun license was revoked.
Martin had successfully applied for a FOID card in 2014 after he lied about his criminal background, which included a 1995 aggravated assault conviction in Mississippi that should have prevented him from owning any weapons. When state police conducted their own background check on Martin, the conviction did not turn up on several state and federal databases they used.
The conviction turned up five days later in another background check for Martin’s concealed-carry license application. The conviction likely only showed up because Martin submitted an optional fingerprint to expedite his application, the state police said.
Though Martin’s concealed-carry application was denied and his FOID card revoked, the handgun he purchased in the few days between the applications — the same one used in last Friday’s rampage — was never confiscated.
The state police noted that it is required by state law to notify local police of a revoked FOID, but local authorities are not required to acknowledge receipt of a letter.
The Aurora Police Department on Tuesday said it had found no record it was alerted that Martin’s FOID had been revoked five years before the attack.
“Our records have not confirmed notification of a FOID card revocation or the recovery of firearms from the named subject in 2014 or any time since,” Aurora police said in its statement.
The state police said gun-law lapses similar to Martin’s instance are not uncommon.
Once a FOID card is revoked, a card holder is required to return their license and submit a form — called a Firearm Disposition Record — within 48 hours informing police that they had gotten rid of any weapons they owned.
In 2018 about 75 percent of FOID card holders whose FOID cards were revoked — 8,202 of 10,818 — never told police if they had given up any weapons in their possession. The same year, more than 7,300 of FOID holders never returned their revoked FOID cards, the state police said.
From 2014 to 2019, there have only been 110 arrests for failure to return a FOID card or not filling out a Firearm Disposition Record, according to state police. Last year, there were only 10 arrests.
