Illinois population figures. This will be old hat and boring to some of you; feel free to skip it, but there's a quiz later.
Illinois population in the 2000 census:
11,430,602 (I presume this does not include known illegal aliens, but I don't pretend to know.)
Population of Macoupin County, my home sweet home:
47,679 ( Not everybody wants to move here. Y'all wanna be a hog farmer or a coal miner?)
Population of Cook County: (home of Chicago)
5,105,044 (Are you beginning to see the issue here? In terms of total population, almost 45% of Illinois lives in Cook County.)
If we take Cook County and add in Lake (516,418), McHenry (183,241), Kane (317,471), Dupage (781,689) and Will (357,313) counties (commonly called the Collar Counties because they border Cook and are considered the "Chicago Metropolitan area) we get a figure of 7,261,176.
Why does that matter? As I said in the last post, Chicago is the key to Illinois. Allow our enemies to propagandize 7.25 million out of 11.4 million Illinois citizens (that's 64%!) without at least trying to counter and refute their message, and we have no right to act surprised that they beat us up all the time. But we do worse than that, because we tend to antagonize those Chicago folks every chance we get. The only thing that saves us is that our opponents are deliriously arrogant and they tend to destroy their own best efforts. If Richard Daley and Rod Blagojevich had any idea how to work with downstate legislators (or each other, for that matter) we'd be in much worse trouble in Illinois than we are. As it is, we're beating back their attempts at additional gun control and poised on the brink of pushing for meaningful concealed carry in Illinois. To get to where we want to be, we need to find a way to enlist at least some of those Chicago voters.
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4 comments:
I tell my students, college level history and government, that the red state blue state thing is bogus. It's not red and blue states. It's densely populated blue urban areas and red everything else. If New York city sank into the ocean, New York state would be Red as hell. Same everywhere else.
Even here in Houston, there is a strong dichotomy between the population IN the city vs the 'burbs where I live. the state Senate district I live in is one of the reddest in the state, but Houston ALWAYS has a democrat mayor and city council. (Ok technically it is "non-partisan", and if you believe that, I've got some bottom land in Louisiana to sell ya...)
The problem with the FIOD card is that the state gets to decide who gets one. What you need to do is put together a large enough group of people that have been denied FIOD's for no justifiable cause and sue in Federal court. The tide of gun grabbing courts is turning, two of the circuits have already ruled that the second amendment is an individual right, and the current makeup of the Supreme court leans that way too it would seem. This would be a good test case to overturn US v Miller which is the backbone of all gun control laws. Break that leg and the whole house of cards falls.
You know, that's an interesting idea. I don't know that you'd find many people who've simply been denied a FOID without statutory cause.
In my friend's case, for instance, they denied him because he was a felon with a warrant. When they found out that he wasn't a felon and didn't have a warrant, they issued him the FOID toot sweet.
Now, delays are another issue. However, I don't know what you'd have to do to show standing in that case. If you were delayed, but you got the FOID eventually, I'm not sure any federal court would care.
We have "non-partisan" Mayor-and-Council government in Springfield, IL, too. They don't even pretend to honor it; they publicly plot Democrat and Republican strategies.
here is a link that underlines your point:
http://www.alphecca.com/?p=237
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