Gun owners in Illinois are bracing for a fight against the latest round of legislation aimed at inhibiting their right to keep and bear arms. With efforts to essentially ban the ownership of firearms having been struck down by the Supreme Court, and Illinois now standing as the only state that makes no provision for legal concealed carry of firearms, leftist politicians in Chicago and throughout the state are far from conceding defeat.

In a few days, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) will meet in Washington with the express intention of building “muscles of respect and empathy and tolerance.” The invitation to meet in Washington was extended in July, when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton addressed the OIC during its meeting in Istanbul, Turkey. However, despite the trappings of talk about tolerance, implementation of the OIC’s agenda would restrict the free speech around the globe.

During the defense of Bataan in 1942, an American chaplain, Fr. William T. Cummings, is reported to have declared, “There are no atheists in the foxholes.” But if one Army intelligence officer has his way, there will soon be chaplains to serve those atheists when they are not in foxholes. Capt. Ryan Jean is seeking to become a military chaplain who will serve his fellow atheists in the Army — an ironic course of action which raises fundamental questions about the role and purpose of the military chaplaincy.

Operation “Fast and Furious” — the scandalous sale of thousands of weapons to Mexican drug lords with the complicity of President Obama’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (still known as ATF) — is now being used as an excuse for further governmental interference in the rights of American citizens to keep and bear arms. Rather than blaming the ineptitude of a federal agency run amok, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D.-Calif.) declares that the fundamental problem exposed by the “Fast and Furious” debacle is, in fact, that “anyone can walk in and buy anything” when it comes to firearms.

Should American high school students be required to recite the pledge of allegiance? This is a question which has generated controversy over the years, but rarely if ever has the controversy centered on the notion that the students in question would be required to pledge allegiance to a foreign nation. Nevertheless, this was situation at the high school in the McAllen, Texas Independent School District, where students were required to pledge allegiance to Mexico.

Tensions are building in Georgia over a controversial new law which would restrict the rights of gun owners, and the judges of the 11th Circuit Court may be weighing precisely how many of the fundamental rights of the American people will be at stake when they issue their ruling in a case involving the right of licensed gun owners to carry their firearms with them to church.

With Wisconsin only days away from being the 49th state to enact legislation that allows for the concealed carry of firearms, pressure is growing for Illinois to finally concede to its citizens the right of self-defense enshrined in the federal constitution.

Wisconsin is now poised to be the 49th state to permit the carrying of concealed firearms, if Gov. Scott Walker signs into law a bill which passed the state’s house and senate with strong majority votes.

Once Walker signs the bill, Illinois will be the last state which utterly refuses to recognize the right of citizens to self-defense. An article for the Journal Sentinel (reprinted at wisconsinconcealedcarry.com) reports:

Approximately 1.3 million residents of Illinois hold state-issued Firearm Owner Identification (FOID) cards, and if the current plan of Attorney General Lisa Madigan comes to pass, their names will become part of the public record. Madigan’s decision comes in response to a public records request by the Associated Press; the AP claims “that the list of FOID cardholders is public record and must be disclosed. The permit holders' addresses and telephone numbers would remain private.” But such an attempt to dismiss privacy concerns is easily negated by the ease with which a host of Internet search engines — and an artifact of 20th century technology called the “phone book” — could easily allow criminals to reconnect those permit holders’ names to their addresses and phone numbers.

An important step was taken yesterday in Wyoming toward restoring the constitutionally protected right of Americans to keep and bear arms, as that state became the second in less than a year to enact legislation affirming the right of its citizens to carry a concealed firearm without a special government-issued license. Following adoption in the state Senate, the vote of the House in the Wyoming legislature approved the bill by a vote of 48–8 several weeks ago, and Gov. Matt Mead (photo, left) signed it into law on March 3.