The multiple lawsuits taking on Illinois’ ban on “assault weapons” and large capacity magazines could be the next gun ban case that the Supreme Court considers in conference, but at the moment the litigation is still in the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, where oral arguments should soon be scheduled in Barnett v. Raoul.
Over the weekend we wrote about the historic friend of the court brief filed by the DOJ, where the agency argued for the first time that bans on semi-automatic long guns are a violation of the Second Amendment. On Monday, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker was asked about the brief, and bloviated his way through a word salad of a response.
“Look, change of administration, that’s their, you know, this is their, you know, they obviously don’t understand the damage that is being done across the country where there are no assault weapons bans,” Pritzker said.
Pritzker said opponents of the ban don’t accept the positives of restricting access to firearms, as he says was done temporarily by the federal government in the 1990s.
“The number of killings went down significantly and so they’re’ just, they’re making, they’re just wrongheaded on so many things, and this is just one of those,” he said.
Pritzker must not be looking at recent crime stats, because violent crime and homicides are going down significantly right now in many places, including those without a semi-auto ban. Homicides in New Orleans, for instance, plunged 48% between 2022 and 2024, and are down another 34% so far this year. Murders have dropped by more than 20% in Atlanta, and by more than 40% in Dallas (through March 31).
Homicides are down substantially in Chicago as well, but literally no one is crediting the bans on semi-automatic long guns enacted by the state through the Protect Illinois Communities Act or the Cook County ban that’s been in place for several years. The truth is that rifles of any kind are rarely used in crimes, and those intent on committing mass murder will use whatever tool is available to them. The homicide rate in New Orleans, for example, would be down a whopping 61% in 2025 were it not for the New Year’s Day attack in the French Quarter where a man drove his truck into a crowd of people, killing 14 people.
While the governor is repeating his stale and tired talking points, almost three dozen State’s Attorneys in Illinois have weighed in with their opposition to the ban in an amicus brief to the Ninth Circuit. The 35 prosecutors argue that PICA and its ban on commonly-owned firearms and magazines is unconstitutional under Bruen.
In 2020 alone, nearly 2.8 million AR-15-style rifles were produced or imported into the United States. Further, AR-15-style rifles accounted for “almost one-half of all rifles (48%) produced in 2018.” A recent survey of gunowners found that a staggering 24.6 million Americans have owned or now own one or more AR-15-style rifles. In fact, the widespread use of these firearms is precisely what led the sponsors of the Act to target these commonly used firearms. The District Court was correct when it noted that “AR-type weapons are both ‘commonly available’ in the United States and have been called the country’s most popular rifle for decades.”
The Second Amendment protects not only the semiautomatic rifles and pistols, but also the magazines the Act bans. Logically, the right to keep and bear arms necessarily includes the right to keep and bear the components (such as ammunition and magazines) without which the firearms cannot function. As the Ninth Circuit succinctly put it, “without bullets, the right to bear arms would be meaningless.”
The statistics regarding the “common use” of the detachable magazines banned by the Act are equally conclusive: millions of law-abiding Americans own tens of millions – if not hundreds of millions – of such magazines for use of their legally-owned semiautomatic firearms. In fact, “approximately half of all privately owned magazines in the United States” – roughly 115 million in total – are capable of holding “more than 10 rounds of ammunition.” After all, every AR-15-style rifle comes standard with magazines with a capacity of 15 or more rounds, as do many popular semiautomatic pistols. For example, the Beretta Model 92, “[a]nother popular handgun used for self-defense … which entered the market in 1976 and comes standard with a sixteen-round magazine.”
It’s Pritzker who’s “wrongheaded” when it comes to gun bans. There’s no way that criminalizing the sale or possession of the most popular rifle in the country is supported by the text of the Second Amendment, Supreme Court precedent, or the national tradition of gun ownership in this country. Banning guns doesn’t lead to less crime, as is evident by the thousands of handgun-involved homicides in Chicago in the decades when the city banned possession of pistols. Fighting crime and restricting civil rights don’t go hand-in-hand, and PICA’s gun and magazine bans are not only unnecessary to protect Illinois communities. They’re flagrantly unconstitutional as well.
Read the full article here
