December 14, 2023 03:30 PM UTC

SCOTUS Lets Illinois Mag Limit, AWB Take Effect

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• by: Colorado Pols

Notable news this afternoon from the U.S. Supreme Court, which has declined to halt the implementation of new laws in the state of Illinois to ban firearms meeting the criteria of an “assault weapons” as well as (Colorado readers take note) the state’s new limit on gun magazine capacity. NBC News Chicago:

The Supreme Court on Thursday declined to put on hold a new Illinois law that would ban high-power semiautomatic weapons like the one used in the mass killing of seven people at a 2022 parade in a Chicago suburb…

The Protect Illinois Communities Act bans dozens of specific brands or types of rifles and handguns, including the popular AR-15, .50-caliber guns, attachments and rapid-firing devices. No rifle will be allowed to accommodate more than 10 rounds, with a 15-round limit for handguns.

Those who own such guns and accessories when the law was enacted have to register them, including serial numbers, with the Illinois State Police. That process began Oct. 1.

NPR provides additional context:

Last year, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority ruled that gun restrictions, in order to be constitutional, must be analogous to laws on the books at the nation’s founding. As a result, an Illinois gun retailer and a gun rights advocacy group challenged the state’s law, contending that the “ban is not consistent with the nation’s history and tradition of firearms regulation and fails constitutional muster.”

An ideologically mixed panel of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the law, however, writing that the Supreme Court’s recent decision on the right to bear arms “extends only to weapons in common use for a lawful purpose,” not to semiautomatic weapons that “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 “gun rights advocacy group” who filed this suit is the National Association for Gun Rights, run by the founder of Colorado’s notorious Rocky Mountain Gun Owners group Dudley Brown along with the group’s vice president, former Colorado Rep. Steve Humphrey. NAGR never once won in court all the way up to their rejected SCOTUS appeal, which is a major reason why the high court saw no reason to explain their decision to not intervene. Though it’s possible that the issue may come before the court via a more dissentious case, for now Dudley Brown and the “no compromise” gun nuts have struck out in the Prairie State.

Although an assault weapons ban fizzled at the Colorado Capitol this year, it’s certainly possible that this decision by the U.S. Supreme Court could at least motivate lawmakers to step up enforcement of the state’s decade-old 15-round magazine limit, which has survived many court challenges but is unenforced in areas of the state policed by conservative county sheriffs and prosecutors. SCOTUS’ lurch to the right under ex-President Donald Trump and ex-Sen. Cory Gardner had left gun safety advocates worried that their efforts would be broadly undone, but this decision is a sign that, as in previous generations, the Court is not quite as pigeon-holeable as the partisan confirmation process makes us think.

The next time the Court does something horrible, you can forget we admitted that.