Federal Judge Enjoins Enforcement of the Illinois ‘Assault Weapon’ Ban
A federal judge in Illinois recently issued a permanent injunction against that state’s “assault weapon” ban, deeming it inconsistent with the Second Amendment. The Protect Illinois Communities Act (PICA) “is an unconstitutional affront to the Second Amendment and must be enjoined,” U.S. District Judge Stephen P. McGlynn wrote in Barnett v. Raoul, which combines several challenges to the law, on Friday. “The Government may not deprive law-abiding citizens of their guaranteed right to self-defense as a means of offense.”
McGlynn imposed a 30-day stay on his injunction to allow an appeal that seems likely to succeed. Last year in Bevis v. City of Naperville, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit vacated a preliminary injunction against PICA that McGlynn issued in April 2023. The 7th Circuit concluded that the state was likely to prevail in its defense of the law.
The 168-page opinion that McGlynn issued on Friday, which followed a bench trial, aims to reconcile the 7th Circuit’s reasoning, which was based on a distinction between “military” weapons and “Arms protected by the Second Amendment,” with the U.S. Supreme Court’s Second Amendment precedents. That’s a tall order. But the Firearms Policy Coalition (FPC), which represents the plaintiffs in one of the PICA lawsuits, argues that the evidence presented at trial showed that “PICA fails even under the Seventh Circuit’s misguided test,” which it says “conflicts with binding Supreme Court precedent.”
Illinois legislators enacted PICA in January 2023, six months after a gunman used a Smith & Wesson M&P15 rifle to kill seven people at an Independence Day parade in Highland Park. Among other things, the law bans a long list of specific rifle models, along with any semi-automatic rifle that accepts detachable magazines and has one or more of six listed features: a pistol grip or thumbhole stock, a protruding grip, a folding or adjustable stock, a flash suppressor, a grenade launcher, or a barrel shroud. PICA also bans “large capacity ammunition feeding devices,” defined to include rifle magazines that hold more than 10 rounds and pistol magazines that hold more than 15 rounds.
Illinois House Speaker Chris Welch (D–Westchester) said the law was aimed at “weapons of war.” That phrase suggested that Welch was talking about selective-fire rifles like those carried by U.S. soldiers, which can shoot automatically.
That was clearly not true. Such rifles are strictly regulated under federal law, which has forbidden sales of newly manufactured machine guns to civilians since 1986. PICA does not deal with machine guns; it deals with semi-automatic firearms, which fire one round per trigger pull.
Illinois Senate President Don Harmon (D–Oak Park) said PICA “begins the pushback against weapons whose only intent is to eviscerate other human beings.” Since firearms are inanimate objects that cannot form an intent, and since only a tiny percentage of the guns banned by PICA are ever used to commit crimes, that remark was puzzling. But it reflected the difficulty that legislators face when they try to ban guns that supposedly are good for nothing but mass murder.
Such rhetoric, in any event, has no constitutional significance. In the landmark 2008 case District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court upheld the Second Amendment right to keep handguns for self-defense, even though such firearms are used in crimes (including mass shootings) much more often than the rifles that Illinois banned.
“We are aware of the problem of handgun violence in this country, and we take seriously the concerns raised by the many amici who believe that prohibition of handgun ownership is a solution,” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in the majority opinion. “The Constitution leaves the District of Columbia a variety of tools for combating that problem, including some measures regulating handguns….But the enshrinement of constitutional rights necessarily takes certain policy choices off the table. These include the absolute prohibition of hand
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