U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth said nationwide gun regulation is needed to prevent incidents such as the Halloween night shooting in Bloomington which left one teenager dead and eight others injured.
“The fact of the matter is, parents should not worry about their children going to school,” Duckworth said Monday during a stop in Bloomington. “People should not be afraid of a mass shooting wherever you are. It’s simply not acceptable.”
The soon-to-be senior senator from Illinois said she supported legislation written in the wake of the 2016 mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando.
“I did a sit-in when I was in the House of Representatives with the great John Lewis demanding a vote on gun legislation—which, by the way, Republicans said they supported but were not willing to sign the discharge petition on because they were afraid of the gun lobby,” Duckworth said.
Duckworth was in Bloomington attending a Democratic “get out the vote” campaign event at Lucca Grill. She was among a caravan of other Democrats that included Gov. JB Pritzker and Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton, who are both on the ballot in Tuesday’s election.
Stratton is seeking to become the junior senator in a race against former Illinois Republican Party Chair Don Tracy. The two are competing for outgoing U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin’s seat.
In her remarks to a crowd of supporters at Lucca Grill, Stratton did not mention anything about her views on gun legislation, though in her role as lieutenant governor she was part of an administration which sought to tighten Illinois’ gun laws, which Tracy opposed as head of the Illinois GOP.
Pritzker signed legislation in January 2023 banning the sale of semiautomatic firearms and requiring registration for certain types of high-capacity guns. Illinois is generally considered to have some of the strictest gun laws in the country, including universal background checks and more recently implemented safe storage and red flag laws limiting people’s access to guns when an order of protection has been filed against them.
Duckworth, a combat veteran who served in the Army National Guard, said she’s proposed a bill in Congress modeled on Illinois’ Firearm Owner Identification [FOID] standards.
“This doesn’t restrict your access to weapons unless you have a violent criminal felony conviction,” she said. “But it certainly is something that would be helpful to law enforcement to be sure we are tracing, you know, keeping tabs on folks who travel from one state to another.”
Police have not identified the type of gun or guns used in Sunday’s mass shooting and declined to share details of an ongoing investigation during Monday’s press conference. But guns crossing state lines has contributed to violent incidents in Bloomington-Normal before. In 2024, a mother of three in Normal was shot and killed by her ex-husband, who then killed himself. The shooter skirted state laws by travelling to Iowa, where someone can purchase a gun from a private seller without a valid FOID card.
Duckworth doubted colleagues in neighboring states like Iowa, Indiana and Missouri, which have looser gun laws, would be open to her FOID bill.
“Not as long as they’re Republicans who are completely dependent on the gun lobby to get re-elected,” she said. “But I will tell you, as someone who carried an M-16 and an M-4 in combat, weapons of war don’t belong on our streets.”
Duckworth said high-capacity magazines, which are banned in Illinois, are a “common denominator” in a lot of mass shootings [characterized as incidents in which four or more people are shot].
Pritzker's response
Pritzker called the mass shooting a “tragedy.”
He applauded Illinois State Police for assisting the Bloomington Police Department investigation into Sunday's shooting, which has also enlisted help from the FBI and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives [ATF].
Pritzker additionally noted the state’s investment in community violence intervention programs and growing the state police force to its highest capacity in 15 years.
“I think we’ve all got to say, seriously, what are the underlying causes of crime?” he said. “And what has somebody who’s 16, 17, 18 years old carrying a gun and shooting a bunch of people?”
Authorities have not identified a suspect or suspects, or a suspected age range, noting only a general description as Black males. The average mass shooter, according to the Rockefeller Institute of Government, is 34, male and white.
“I think the answer, in my view, has been that it’s an underlying challenge of poverty. There’s an underlying challenge of young people having too easy access to guns. And so, we’re going to look at that at the state level to see what we can do.”
Pritzker noted the state’s assault weapons ban and other measures to limit gun access to violent criminals and domestic abusers. But disagreed with the characterization that Illinois has strict gun laws.
“We’ve got to make sure we’re doing everything we can going forward to prevent [a mass shooting] from happening,” he said. “It happens, unfortunately, all over the country, but it’s a shocking thing that it happens right here in the Bloomington-Normal area.”
