An Illinois firearms retailer and a national gun rights group asked the U.S. Supreme Court for a second time on Wednesday to block a Democratic-backed state-wide ban on semiautomatic firearms and larger-capacity magazines enacted after a deadly mass shooting in Chicago’s Highland Park in 2022.
The National Association for Gun Rights and Mr. Robert Bevis, owner of the Law Weapons & Supply store, made the request after a lower court denied their bid for a preliminary injunction against the ban, as well as a similar ban enacted by Naperville, a city in the Chicago Metropolitan Area.
An earlier request to the Supreme Court for an injunction against the ban was rebuffed in May.
State authorities passed the ban following a massacre at an Independence Day parade in Highland Park in 2022, where a 21-year-old man shot people at random from the rooftop of a local store, leaving seven dead and 48 wounded.
The Protect Illinois Communities Act, signed into law in January by Democratic Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, banned the sale and distribution of many types of high-powered semiautomatic “assault weapons,” including AR-15 rifles. The act also prohibits the sale of magazines that take more than 10 rounds for all types of long guns, and 15 rounds for all types of handguns.
The National Association for Gun Rights (NAGR), which bills itself as a group “accepting NO COMPROMISE on the issue of gun control,” as well as Mr. Bevis and his company, argued as plaintiffs that Naperville’s restrictions on the sale of certain rifles and the state’s broader ban constitute a violation of the Second Amendment, which protects the right of the people “to keep and bear Arms.”
On Nov. 3, the Chicago-based 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the bans, arguing that the Second Amendment applies to weapons meant for individual self-defense, and not for the military.
So-called assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, the court found, “are much more like machine guns and military-grade weaponry than they are like the many different types of firearms that are used for individual self-defense.”
The ruling prompted the plaintiffs to take their issues to the nation’s highest court again.
The Protect Illinois Communities Act is currently being contested in several cases before federal and state level courts.
The availability of semiautomatic rifles remains one of the more contentious debates in a nation torn over an increasing number of mass shootings in recent decades. The Supreme Court has so far taken an expansive view of the Second Amendment, striking down gun restrictions in three landmark rulings since 2008.
In 2022, the court struck down a New York state law and acknowledged a constitutional right to carry a handgun in public for self-defense. That ruling also required gun restrictions to be “consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation” in order to comply with the U.S. Constitution.
Reuters contributed to this article.
