More than two years ago, Gary Martin walked into a disciplinary meeting with his supervisors at an Aurora, Illinois, valve manufacturing plant. They told him he was being let go. “Yeah, it’s over,” a survivor remembered him saying. Martin pulled out a .40-caliber handgun and killed four of the people in the room. He killed another co-worker elsewhere in the plant, and shot and wounded another co-worker and five police officers before dying in a shootout with police.

As a convicted felon, Martin should never have been allowed to have a gun. His firearm owner’s identification card had been revoked. But there was no follow-up from law enforcement to ensure he had surrendered his handgun. “Some disgruntled person walked in and had access to a firearm that he shouldn’t have had access to,” Aurora police Chief Kristen Ziman said after that terrible Feb. 15, 2019, afternoon.

Pledges to make sure someone like Martin would never again have access to guns followed. Two years later, nothing has changed. The spring legislative session in Springfield ended without movement on House Bill 3245 that would have addressed the problems exposed by the Aurora mass shooting.

Fortunately, a second bill that addresses revoked FOID cards tentatively is on the agenda this week for a quick, two-day session of staggered House and Senate meetings. Lawmakers should pass it before they leave town again, and Gov. J.B. Pritzker should sign it into law.

For the last two years, we, along with gun safety advocates, have called for raising the FOID card application fee from $10 to $20 so that a portion of that increase could fund a task force that would follow up with gun owners who’ve had their FOID revoked — but have yet to relinquish their guns. The law requires felons to lose access to firearms, but lax enforcement allows many of those individuals to keep them.

A bill proposed by Rep. Jay Hoffman, D-Swansea, would set up that task force, which would “conduct enforcement operations against persons whose Firearm Owner’s Identification Cards have been revoked or suspended ... ” Hoffman’s bill also would create for law enforcement agencies a database of people who have had their FOID cards revoked or suspended, and would broaden background checks to include person-to-person gun purchases.

Last year, the Tribune reported that 80% of people who had their FOID cards revoked had failed to document that they had gotten rid of their guns, as the law requires. State records showed that, as of February 2020, 36,600 guns belonging to people who were ineligible to possess them had remained unaccounted for in Illinois.

Gary Martin wasn’t the only revoked cardholder who kept his gun and later killed with it. In the case of Christopher Miller, the victim was his 18-month-old son. In September 2019, Miller appeared at the Joliet home of his estranged wife, choked her until she fell unconscious and then fatally shot their toddler, Colton, before killing himself.

Like Martin, Miller had his FOID card revoked. He also had been arrested in Cook County and released on bond without anyone checking to see if his guns had been seized. His wife had told officials in DuPage County that he still had guns — and no one followed up.

Lawmakers worried about the erosion of gun rights are missing the point on this one. No one is taking away guns from people who lawfully can possess them. This is about keeping guns out of the hands of people who’ve had their FOID cards revoked.

The law that bans people with revoked FOIDs from having guns is already on the books; what has been missing is the means to facilitate enforcement of that law.

If lawmakers again fail to act, we’d like to see them explain themselves to the families of the people Martin killed — Russell Beyer, Vicente Juarez, Clayton Parks, Josh Pinkard and Trevor Wehner — and the mother of Colton Miller. If a task force is the best way forward to supplement law enforcement in removing guns, it needs to get off the ground — now.