With the recent wave of gun control legislation that swept through the state legislator, one local lawmaker is working on Governor Bruce Rauner’s Public Safety Committee to put more thought behind legislation addressing firearms.
37th District State Senator Chuck Weaver says that a number of the bills that were going through the General Assembly were overreaching and were taking away rights from law-abiding gun owners, and that the Governor’s committee will be looking at a handful of issues.
“Even the people that are anti-gun – if they read these bills they’d say ‘wait a second, there are things in here that don’t address the problem, they’re still taking away rights from people,'” said Weaver. “So he has six items that he feels are important that we need to be watching, and those are six different committees that’ll be working on solving those.”
Weaver says that legislators need to be looking outside of gun control laws as a means to address the mass shooting issues that have emerged in recent years.
“We have said no on the gun control too often, without saying yes to here’s the other things we need to be presenting as solutions. So that’s what the Governor is doing here,” said the Senator. “We also have to be sure that while there may be some logical gun control out there that is not overreaching. That’s fair. People can stand back and say, ‘wait a second – yeah this is where we need to be.'”
One thing Weaver says that some of these issues are societal. He said that 26 of the 27 largest mass shooters had no father figure in their life.
