For a second time, the U.S. Supreme Court has effectively allowed the continuance of an enacted ban in Illinois on a category of firearms termed assault weapons, refusing an appeal from a gun rights group challenging the restrictions not long before the ban is set to take effect at the beginning of the next calendar year.
The far-reaching ban — which includes provisions by which individuals who already owned such weapons have the opportunity to keep them — was made possible by election results from 2022, in which Democrats maintained control of state government in Illinois. Democratic Governor J.B. Pritzker, against whom a Trump-aligned Republican was running, won another term after the former president personally singled out the Midwestern Democrat for criticism over responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Another repeated target of Trump’s circles on similar grounds, Michigan Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer, won another term — by a large margin — in the same elections.
Illinois did have a GOP governor for a four-year stint corresponding to some of Trump’s time in office, but that ended in 2019. The Illinois restrictions — under which the process by which owners of the targeted firearms can register with authorities as now required has already started — have repeatedly been upheld already by courts at the lower level both in the Illinois judicial system (including its state Supreme Court) and the federal judiciary, including a three-judge panel on an appeals court.
A key piece of background for this case is a past ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court demanding that gun regulations be comparable to legal frameworks in use around the country’s founding, but — as explained in NPR — the appeals court judges concluded that assault weapons were, essentially, a separate category. That judicial panel called the weapons “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.” Advocacy at the national level for similarly fashioned firearm restrictions is continuing as the U.S. continues to face gun violence.
