"...Lawmakers have proposed including public transportation, interstate highway rest areas controlled by the Illinois Department of Transportation and public parks and athletic facilities under the control of a park district or municipality as allowable areas to carry a concealed weapon...
"'There are many individuals throughout the state of Illinois who rely on public transit as their primary mode of transportation,” said Rep. Jerry Costello, D-Smithton, who is sponsoring House Bill 6047 allowing for concealed carry on public transportation. “I do not believe their Second Amendment rights should be infringed upon simply because they take a train or bus rather than driving their own vehicle...'
"'Allowing people to carry concealed weapons on our buses and trains that provide more than 1.6 million rides every day would bring an increased and significant safety risk to both customers and employees,” said Jeff Tolman, Chicago Transit Authority spokesman. “It could also lead to increased insurance rates and higher security costs, which would undermine the safe and affordable service that we provide to the Chicago area...” (Bills Seek to Expand Where Conceal Carry Is Legal).
Commentary/Quotations from an earlier post:
...Let’s continue to celebrate the right of self-defense: “The Declaration of Independence asserts that ‘life’ is among the unalienable rights of all people. The Second Amendment guarantees the right of the people to keep and bear arms for ‘security.’ The laws of all states recognize the right to use force in self-defense. The Supreme Court has recognized that a person ‘may repel force by force’ in self-defense, and is ‘entitled to stand his ground and meet any attack made upon him with a deadly weapon, in such a way and with such force’ as needed to prevent ‘great bodily injury or death.’ Beard v. United States (1895).
“Congress affirmed the right to own guns for protective purposes in the Gun Control Act (1968) and Firearm Owners’ Protection Act (1986). In 1982, the Senate Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on the Constitution described the right to arms as ‘a right of the individual citizen to privately possess and carry in a peaceful manner firearms and similar arms’” (H.R. 2959, the Right-to-Carry Reciprocity Act of 2013 (March 11, 2014)).
“[Let’s pursue a policy goal that continues to shift] the distribution of gun possession as far as possible in the direction of likely aggressors being disarmed, with as few prospective victims as possible being disarmed. To disarm non-criminals [through more gun control laws] in the hope that this might indirectly help reduce access to guns among criminals is a very high-stakes gamble, and the risks will not be reduced by pretending that crime victims rarely use guns for self-defense” (Gary Kleck, Targeting Guns: Firearms and Their Control).
P.S.
Although I agree with background checks for private and gun show sales, and “gun control legislation [that mandates] prohibitions on concealed weapons and possession of firearms by felons and the mentally-deranged, and laws imposing conditions and qualifications on a [specific] commercial sale of arms [such as high-powered assault weapons]…” (District of Columbia v. Heller – Case Brief Summary), gun control legislation that will affect responsible law-abiding citizens will never deter the everyday robber or the potentially-deranged terrorist from obtaining illegal weapons, despite the government's feeble attempt to require states to automate a list of past felons and other mentally-disturbed individuals in the federal database (after the carnage at Virginia Tech). Why? It is impossible to predict who will become the next assassin (from "A Letter to a Friend about Gun Control," posted September 14, 2011 on this blog).
The Illinois State Police began issuing licenses to residents in the spring of 2014; as of June 1, 2016, there were a total of 181,489 active concealed carry licenses (Illinois State Police).
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