Federal appeals court upholds sweeping Illinois gun ban
A federal appeals court on Friday upheld Illinois’ sweeping ban on high-powered guns, rejecting an argument that the law violates the Second Amendment rights of residents but leaving the door open for opponents to make a more compelling case as the legal battle continues.
The ruling from the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the highest court to hear challenges to date, is a victory for Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker and supporters of a law passed in January in response to the mass shooting at Highland Park’s 2022 Fourth of July parade, which left seven people dead and dozens injured.
Two members of a three-judge appellate panel found the state and municipalities that have banned the high-powered weapons and high-capacity magazines “have a strong likelihood of success” in defending the laws. The panel upheld rulings by the federal district court in Chicago that kept the gun ban in place and overturned a conflicting ruling from a federal court in southern Illinois.
“As we know from long experience with other fundamental rights, such as the right to free speech, the right peaceably to assemble, the right to vote, and the right to free exercise of religion, even the most important personal freedoms have their limits,” Judge Diane Wood, appointed to the appeals court by President Bill Clinton, wrote in the majority opinion, in which she was joined by Judge Frank Easterbrook, an appointee of President Ronald Reagan.
“Government may punish a deliberately false fire alarm; it may condition free assembly on the issuance of a permit; it may require voters to present a valid identification card; and it may punish child abuse even if it is done in the name of religion. The right enshrined in the Second Amendment is no different.”
However, the majority noted that its opinion deals only with preliminary injunctions issued by lower courts and does not “rule definitively on the constitutionality” of the state and local laws at issue in the case.
The dissent came from Judge Michael Brennan, an appointee of President Donald Trump and the third member of a panel that heard arguments June 29 in a case that consolidated a half-dozen federal lawsuits.
Brennan wrote that the state, along with Cook County and the cities of Chicago and Naperville, “failed to meet their burden to show that their bans are part of the history and tradition of firearms regulation,” the threshold established in a U.S. Supreme Court ruling last year overturning New York state’s concealed carry law.
David Sigale, an attorney for the Illinois State Rifle Association, which is a plaintiff in one of the six lawsuits combined in the case reviewed by the 7th Circuit, said Friday he was still reviewing the decision but indicated the association and other plaintiffs will be deciding their next legal steps soon.
“We’re looking at our available legal remedies, one of which is petitioning the Supreme Court for review,” Sigale said.
Opponents also could ask the full 7th Circuit to review the three-judge panel’s ruling.
“(We) haven’t made that determination yet. And I’m sure it will be a busy weekend talking about that,” said Dan Eldridge, president of Federal Firearms Licensees of Illinois, a plaintiff in one of the lawsuits.
Friday’s ruling didn’t come as a surprise given the tone of the judges’ questions during arguments, Eldridge said. “We’ve already been planning for this contingency.”
Pritzker called the ruling “a victory for the members of the General Assembly who stood alongside families, students and survivors who worked so hard to make this day a reality.”
“Now Congress must act so Illinois is not an island surrounded by states with weak protections,” Pritzker said in a statement.
State Rep. Bob Morgan, a Deerfield Democrat who was in the Highland Park parade when the shooting occurred and who later pushed the ban through the legislature, called the ruling “a huge win for anyone committed to reducing gun violence.”
“As mass shootings in the U.S. are on a record pace in 2023, this law has already prevented the sales of thousands of assault weapons and high capacity magazines in Illinois, making our state safer,” Morgan said in a statement, joining Pritzker in calling for a national ban, which has no chance of winning approval in the Republican-controlled U.S. House.
In addition to four cases out of the Southern District of Illinois, the appellate panel also weighed arguments from a Naperville gun shop owner challenging a local ordinance along with the state law. The plaintiffs in that case, Robert Bevis and the National Association for Gun Rights, previously asked the U.S. Supreme Court to block the state and local bans while the case is adjudicated, but the high court declined in May in an unsigned order.
Also part of the consolidated case is a challenge brought against the state, the city of Chicago and Cook County by Chicago emergency room physician Javier Herrera, who argues state and local bans violate his Second Amendment rights. He appealed to the 7th Circuit after a federal-district court judge in Chicago declined to issue an injunction.
Reviewing the history of firearms restrictions in the U.S., the appeals court found that “at least since the Founding there has been an unbroken tradition of regulating weapons” to protect public safety and that the state and local laws at issue “stay within those boundaries.”
“There is a long tradition, unchanged from the time when the Second Amendment was added to the Constitution, supporting a distinction between weapons and accessories designed for military or law-enforcement use, and weapons designed for personal use,” the majority wrote, finding that the newly banned weapons fit into the former category. “The legislation now before us respects and relies on that distinction.”
Brennan in his dissent rejected the majority’s “remarkable conclusion” that the banned weapons and attachments do not qualify as “arms” that fall under the rights granted by the Second Amendment, finding that they indeed do “warrant constitutional protection.”
The federal appeals court’s decision comes as the Illinois State Police has begun the process of allowing anyone who owned guns prohibited under the ban before it became law to register those firearms with the state.
Under the law, those owners have until Jan. 1 to register the guns with the state police or face a misdemeanor for a first offense of having an unregistered firearm covered by the ban, and a felony for subsequent offenses. At public hearings state police held this week in Springfield and Chicago, several gun owners testified about their concerns over the requirement.
The ban, which affects specific high-powered guns and high-capacity ammunition magazines, has faced a slew of lawsuits on the state and federal levels alleging that the law violates the state and U.S. Constitutions.
The appellate court decision comes a little less than three months after the Illinois Supreme Court upheld the ban in a 4-3 ruling following a lawsuit brought forth by plaintiffs that included Republican state Rep. Dan Caulkins, of Decatur. That lawsuit alleged the law violated the equal protection and special legislation clauses of the state constitution.
The weapons ban is not the only firearms-related law being challenged in the courts. On Aug. 14, the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a gun rights group that was also a plaintiff in the federal case against the weapons ban, filed a separate lawsuit alleging a measure passed last spring that allows people to sue gun retailers or manufacturers for improper marketing ploys that contribute to gun violence is unconstitutional.
Also on Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear a case challenging a federal ban on bump stocks, devices that can turn semi-automatic weapons essentially into machine guns. A ruling in that case could have bearing on the Illinois law’s prohibition on devices known as switches, which also increase the firing speed of semi-automatic weapons.
