Illinois-based gun rights advocates are petitioning the U.S. Supreme Court to block a local ordinance and a state measure that substantially restrict gun rights.
The petition was brought by the National Association for Gun Rights and the owner of a gun shop called Law Weapons and Supply.
“This is an exceedingly simple case. The Second Amendment protects arms that are commonly possessed by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes, especially self-defense in the home,” the petition states.
The laws in question, the plaintiffs contend, violate two key high court decisions: District of Columbia v. Heller in 2008 and New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen in 2022.
In the former case, the Supreme Court determined that a District of Columbia law placing high barriers to handgun ownership was illegal.
In the more recent Bruen decision, the court ruled that a New York law requiring citizens to show “proper cause” in order to own a handgun was a violation of the Second Amendment.
Petitioners in the current case contend that the Illinois laws were adopted in contravention of these precedents.
“The arms banned by Respondents are possessed by millions of law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes, including self-defense in the home,” the petition continued.
“Under this Court’s precedents, ’that is all that is needed for citizens to have a right under the Second Amendment to keep such weapons,'” the petitioners wrote, citing an opinion from Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia in their dissent from the court’s decision not to take up a different Second Amendment case from Illinois in 2015.
“There cannot be the slightest question ... that the challenged laws are unconstitutional,” the petition continues, citing the precedent laid out in Bruen, which ruled that “when the Second Amendment’s plain text covers an individual’s conduct, the Constitution presumptively protects that conduct.”
Bruen also placed on government regulators the obligation of proving that gun control proposals are “consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”
‘Absolute Ban’ Violates Constitution
Petitioners argued that “no founding era precedent remotely burdens Second Amendment rights as much as an absolute ban on a category of arms commonly held by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes,” including home defense.“There is no historical analog to such a ban,” they said.
Historically, plaintiffs noted, lower federal courts have erred in favor of gun regulations, deferring to regulators when there was a question of constitutionality. Bruen, the plaintiffs argued, was meant as “a course correction and a reminder to the lower courts that the Second Amendment is not a second-class right.”
However, following the passage of the Illinois and Naperville laws, lower courts rejected petitions to block the laws.
“If the 10 months of Second Amendment litigation since Bruen have taught us anything, it is that many of the lower courts did not get the message,” the petitioners wrote.
In its rejection of the petition, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals proposed an entirely novel legal doctrine: the notion that if a court deems a weapon to be “particularly dangerous,” its use, sale, and ownership isn’t protected by the Second Amendment.
With the petition rejected by both an appeals court and a district court, it’s up to the Supreme Court to determine the ultimate constitutionality of the measures under the standards laid out in Heller and Bruen.
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