Plaintiffs say Illinois law clearly violates principles laid down in landmark Supreme Court decisions in Second Amendment cases.
Two Second Amendment advocacy groups petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to hear arguments against Illinois’s ban on certain semiautomatic firearms and magazines.
The National Association for Gun Rights (NAGR) announced in a Feb. 12, 2024, press release that it had filed a petition for certiorari asking the U.S. Supreme Court to overrule the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals and strike down the Protecting Illinois Communities Act (Act).
The NAGR was joined in the petition by gun store owner Robert Bevis.
“Under the Second Amendment and the Supreme Court’s Heller and Bruen precedents, you can’t ban so-called ‘assault weapons.’ The 7th Circuit had to actually rule that AR-15s aren’t guns at all in order to uphold the gun ban. That’s how open and shut our case is,” Hannah Hill, Executive Director of the National Foundation for Gun Rights (legal arm of the National Association for Gun Rights), wrote in the NAGR press release.
The NAGR wasn’t the only organization to file a petition.
The Second Amendment Foundation (SAF), Illinois State Rifle Association, Firearms Policy Coalition Inc., C4 Gun Store, LLC, Marengo Guns, Incl, and Dane Harrel also filed a petition on Feb. 12. Both groups base their petitions on two landmark decisions that have upended how the Second Amendment is viewed.
In the 2008 case, District of Columbia v. Heller, the court ruled that the Second Amendment protects an individual right and that laws requiring guns to be stored, unloaded, and locked violated the Second Amendment. In 2022, the court issued its decision in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen.
That decision established a text and history standard for new gun laws. Under that test, any new gun law would have to comply with the plain text of the Second Amendment and have a comparable analog in the history of U.S. firearms law.
“Clearly, the Illinois gun and magazine bans are unconstitutional under principles set down in the 2008 Heller ruling and the 2022 Bruen decision,” Alan Gottlieb, SAF founder and executive vice president, wrote in a Feb. 12 SAF press release.
