Politics
Illinois Lawmakers Pass Karina’s Bill, Measure That Requires Police to Take Guns After Orders of Protection
Video: Joining “Chicago Tonight: Latino Voices” to discuss Katina’s Bill are Maralea Negron, director of policy, advocacy and research for The Network: Advocating Against Domestic Violence; and Loren Gutierrez, managing attorney at the Legal Aid Society of Metropolitan Family Services. (Produced by Abena Bediako)
A year and a half after Karina Gonzalez’s death, Illinois lawmakers passed a measure named in her honor as one of their final acts of the two-year session.
Karina’s Bill seeks to protect domestic violence victims by creating uniform processes for removing guns from alleged abusers who are subject an order of protection. The Illinois Senate passed the measure (House Bill 4144) Monday night on a 43-10 vote, and the House passed the proposal 80-33 on Wednesday.
The bill is now headed to Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s desk.
When a judge grants an order of protection, there is currently a legal remedy recognizing that guns should be removed from the home. However, there’s no obvious path for making it happen, and advocates for domestic violence victims say it’s inconsistently applied and therefore failing women like Gonzalez.
Gonzalez was granted an order of protection against her husband, Jose Alvarez, weeks before he shot and killed both her and their teen daughter, Daniela, in July 2023 in the Little Village neighborhood. Alvarez also shot their son, who survived, and was at the statehouse Monday lobbying for the General Assembly to pass the law in his mom’s name.
“Simply put, this bill will save lives,” said Amanda Pyron, CEO of The Network: Advocating Against Domestic Violence, who told lawmakers during a hearing that the time when a survivor seeks and wins an order of protection is an “act of bravery” that involves spending as much as a day recounting their abuse to a judge and contemplating how they’ll have to readjust their lives.
But Pyron said it’s also the most dangerous and is the “time a survivor is most likely to be killed, because it is when an abuser realizes they are losing power and control.”
The danger is amplified when an abuser has easy access to a gun, she said, sharing statistics of a 63% increase in domestic violence firearm-involved deaths in Illinois between 2019 and 2023.
“When firearms and domestic violence mix, the result is often deadly,” Pyron said.
“We see the impacts,” said Maralea Negron, director of policy, advocacy and research for The Network: Advocating Against Domestic Violence, who noted that Latinas experience intimate partner violence at a disproportionate rate. “It feels like every week, we see a new headline of survivors that are being either shot or killed at the hands of someone who says (they) love them and is experiencing firearms-involved domestic violence.”
Critics, however, contest the measure’s effectiveness.
“Over the past year, domestic violence deaths have doubled in our state, and the policies in place that have allowed this to happen were not policies that our side of the aisle championed,” said state Sen. Steve McClure, R-Springfield.
He said Democrats, who control the legislature, have rebuffed GOP-sponsored bills that he believes would protect domestic violence victims, like a proposal to increase the penalties for violating an order of protection, which is usually a misdemeanor.
“Do you know what else is a misdemeanor? If you walk into a store and you take a candy bar and you leave, that’s a misdemeanor,” McClure said. “Do you know how tough it is for these domestic violence victims to go before their abusers in court, and what it puts them through, the fear they have, the torture that is? … Who would want to put themselves through that, for no punishment or little to no punishment?”
Law enforcement groups, which had opposed previous versions of Karina’s Bill, are neutral on the revised version the General Assembly contemplated during its lame duck session, held days before the inauguration of a new General Assembly on Wednesday.
The House sponsor, state Rep. Maura Hirschauer, D-Batavia, said the new measure is a result of prolonged negotiations that sought to address potential legal issues as well as law enforcement’s concerns about their role in seizing guns — also a dangerous endeavor — and how police would store of confiscated guns.
“The most important changes have to do with supporting law enforcement throughout the process. The intent all along is a) to be survivor-centered and take guns away from the abusers; but also, to clarify and strengthen for law enforcement, so they have a clear path forward,” Hirschauer said.
“Our advocates really worked with law enforcement to try to address some of those concerns, but I think at the end of the day, these challenges can be overcome,” said Loren Gutierrez, managing attorney at the Legal Aid Society of Metropolitan Family Services. "I think that when we’re talking about saving people’s lives, it’s worth working through those challenges to make sure that we can have the safety that these survivors deserve.”
An agreement will allow a third-party designated by the gun owner to hold their seized firearms, but not right away — police must hold the guns, and then they can be transferred.
“We wanted accountability to ensure that that third-party person didn’t reside in the same home, and to ensure that there was a clear record of receipt, and that the third-party person knew what they were doing,” Hirschauer said.
Other negotiations dealt with the deadlines law enforcement are given to execute a search warrant.
For example, if there’s no criminal case and no prior record of a domestic situation, law enforcement gets an extra 48 hours to do what Hirschauer described as “due diligence and investigation” before a 96-hour countdown kicks in, during which they have to execute the warrant.
While that gives police some leeway, it also continues to allow domestic violence victims to petition a civil court for an order of protection, rather than filing criminal charges.
However, state Sen. Chapin Rose, R-Mahomet, said many police and sheriff’s departments in the downstate areas he represents — where there may be only one deputy on duty at a time — still won’t have the capacity to meet the requirements, causing practical and legal problems for law enforcement.
He laid out a scenario in which an order of protection with a firearm remedy is granted when the single, part-time police chief is on vacation, requiring other, also short-handed law enforcement agencies to get involved.
“And nobody’s going to get to this in the 48 to 72 hours or whatever it is,” Rose said. “And when someone does get hurt, everybody gets sued. Oh, wait a minute, now that they get sued, maybe they lose their entire license to be a police officer in the first place because they didn’t get it done. There is a real disconnect, as well-intentioned as this is, between what people believe is doable and what is actually doable.”
Firearm advocates, meanwhile, predicted the courts will find the law unconstitutional on ex parte grounds, because a judge can order someone’s guns stripped without their having the opportunity to make their own argument in court.
“Nobody wants to see an armed abuser, at all. However, an individual has a right to a hearing to be found an abuser before we take way the constitutional right from them,” said Josh Witkowski of the Illinois Federation for Outdoor Resources. “We have a presumption of innocence in this country. I don’t like having to be up here testifying like this on this one, because I agree — we should not be arming abusers. But you have the right to be found that first, and that’s where the issue comes in.”
Senate President Don Harmon, however, said lawmakers intentionally waited to move on Karina’s Bill for the U.S. Supreme Court to issue its Rahimi decision, which over the summer ruled in favor of a federal bans on guns for individuals subject to domestic violence restraining orders.
Advocates say they redrafted Karina’s Bill following Rahimi, and that the Illinois attorney general is confident the plan will meet constitutional muster.
The latest iteration of Karina’s Law requires “immediate” danger must be present in order for a court to order someone’s guns and Firearm Owner Identification card temporarily stripped, not just a finding of danger.
Hirschauer noted that the law is confiscating guns ex parte for only a short, and specific time period; the individual who is subject to an order of protection and gun remedy will soon have the chance to go before a judge.
“This whole process is revisited two weeks to a month later when the plenary order is served,” she said.
Gun-rights groups, though, raise questions about what happens to the firearms within that time. They want a stronger chain of custody receipts for seized guns, noting that his organization represents trap shooters whose firearms can cost tens of thousands.
“We would actually like to see language that says it has to state the make, model and serial number of the firearm, as well as the condition of the firearm, including pictures,” Witkowski said.
During the Senate debate, sponsoring Sen. Celina Villanueva, said while she swore an oath to protect the Constitution, she also made a promise to represent her constituents — people like Karina Gonzalez and her children.
Gonzalez was killed in Little Village, blocks from Villanueva’s district office.
“These are guns in the hands of abusers. Abusers! Abusers! These are people that are inflicting harm and damage. They are using fear and isolation in order to have power and control over the people that they claim to love,” she said. “You can go on and on and on, and you can say whatever you want to say. But I am fighting like hell to make sure that what happened in Little Village on July 4 weekend, in Little Village, of 2023 — doesn’t happen again.”
Hirschauer, who on Monday night was preparing for the House debate the following day, said while the compromise version is an improvement on the original, it’s hard to grapple with how long it took to reach this point.
When in January 2023 she first introduced a measure that would pave the way for a court to require the surrender and seizure of firearms, Karina Gonzalez and her daughter Daniela were alive.
They were alive that April when the House passed the proposal, and they were alive later that spring when the legislature adjourned without the Senate following suit.
They were killed over the Fourth of July weekend.
Now, a year and a half later, Hirschauer said the legislature is working with a “better bill.”
“It’s just a shame that we waited 21 months to do it, and people died,” she said.
Abena Bediako contributed to this report.
Note: This article was originally published Jan. 7, 2025, and updated with additional information Jan. 9, 2025.
Contact Amanda Vinicky: @AmandaVinicky | [email protected]
