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The hearing for Rep. Caulkins fight for our 2nd Amendment rights is Friday 03, 1:30 PM. All donations are for the express purpose of paying legal fees generated from this fight for our constitutional rights. ... See MoreSee Less

UPDATE from Rep. Dan Caulkins

Greetings to one and all. We filed our lawsuit on 1/26 in Macon County (Decatur). If you want to check it out, search for Docket 2023 CH3. We have a hearing scheduled before Judge Forbes at 1:30 on February 3rd.

There is some confusion about who is NAMED as individual plaintiffs and who is not. Some of you may have thought that this was going to follow all aspects of Tom DeVore's trailblazing suits, including the naming of a thousand (literally or figuratively) individual plaintiffs.

We opted to try to do something similar to Mr. DeVore's, and at the same time make it better. We opted to file without exposing the individuals supporting us to some of the potential risks of listing yourself as a named plaintiff. That's where our unincorporated association comes in, the Law-Abiding Gun Owners of Macon County.

Again, those who joined our effort were not specifically named for very good, legal reasons, but know that we will all benefit if we win a ruling to stop the enforcement of this law.

Obviously I've been pressed to explain why.

I decided that there are many of us that wanted to challenge Governor Pritzker’s law because we know it’s unconstitutional. A lot of us have donated to FFL IL and other organizations to fund a challenge in Federal Court. Knowing that effort could take months to be heard, we’ve decided to go to the State courts for hopefully a more immediate ruling.

My plan was/is to put together a group that wanted to ban together to support that litigation (a legal definition of an “Association”). By responding to my call to join in, the law considers that to be "voluntary consent for a common purpose" which is to get the law overturned. If we are successful, and get a judgement in our favor, it does not require any individual member of the Association to be named for you to get the benefit.

Why not list specific individual plaintiffs? Well, for one, the Illinois Attorney General's Office could schedule depositions with each and every named plaintiff. The folks over at the Illinois AG's office have the time and resources to do such a thing. Do you think Tom Devore's going to represent you and hundreds (thousands?) of others through a four to six-hour deposition with multiple Attorney General lawyers like the one John Boch sat through as part of Guns Save Life's FOID challenge lawsuit? They grilled Mr. Boch for hours, in large part to prove he had standing. Not only did they want a list of all his firearms, they wanted a list of all of his gun safes including serial numbers, instruction books and sales receipts! Are these individual named plaintiffs in Mr. DeVore's lawsuits ready for that level of exposure?

As if that wasn't enough, as I understand it, in any outcome of Mr. DeVore's suit, there's the potential that all of the named plaintiffs would have to sign off on the agreement. Unless of course he had everyone execute some sort of waiver of those rights as part of signing on to the suit when he collected their payment.

There's more, but you get the idea.

If any of you feel this legal strategy we've employed in this endeavor is not what you expected, and would like your donation returned, please send me an email. I will promptly send you a refund. If you're still on the fence about this, after having learned of the reasoning behind how we did things to protect the people behind our lawsuit, I'd urge you to wait a week (or three) to see how this develops.

Dan Caulkins
dan@dancaulkins.com ... See MoreSee Less