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Abstract
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Effmgham County, Illinois, is literally at the crossroads. Interstate highways 70 and 57 can take you north, south, east, or west. And if you do not catch the idea from the intersection, you will get it when you drive by the "Cross at the Crossroads," high enough to be the tallest cross in the country and low enough to not mess with federal aviation requirements.' Effingham County is a an ideological crossroads as well, where the mostly rural county population of about 30,000 lives in a state of almost 13 million people. The county's politics run Republican, while the state is more predictably Democratic.
Sometimes the political and ideological differences have little impact. School funding measures can bring Democrats and Republicans together and so can capital projects.7 But on other issues Effingham County heads one way while the state heads another. As a state, Illinois has long had restrictions on owning firearms, and tougher restrictions have been proposed. In the spring of 2018, when the Illinois legislature was considering five new gun control measures, Effingham County took a different route, declaring itself a "gun sanctuary."' In the months after Effingham County's actions, many Illinois counties enacted similar sanctuary ordinances, and now almost two-thirds of the state's 102 counties have some form of this law. The wave of sanctuary ordinances has spread well beyond Illinois, with jurisdictions in at least 12 states passing similar laws.
The Second Amendment sanctuary movement has gained attention from media outlets as diverse as Rolling Stone, CNN, and The Wall Street Journal, but has received little attention from either courts or scholars. This Article is a start at filling that gap. This Article will examine Second Amendment sanctuary ordinances and their origins, the history of the broader sanctuary concept, the power struggle between state and local governments, and the impact of the sanctuary ordinances. The Article concludes that the spreading movement of gun sanctuaries might have no legal impact but may still have influence. The influence is neither as powerful as sanctuary supporters might wish, nor as frightening as opponents may fear. In the end, the movement may be a model for political action for groups that have a majority point of view in their geopolitical sub-unit and are at the same time members of a larger political unit with a much different point of view.
Available at: https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/wvlr/vol122/iss3/7
Second Amendment sanctuary movement; Second Amendment sanctuaries
Language: en |