Justices won’t block Illinois laws on rifles, magazines

The Supreme Court on Wednesday refused to block two Illinois laws prohibiting the sale of high-powered guns and high- capacity magazines while challenges to them move forward.

The court’s brief order gave no reasons, which is typical when the court acts on requests for emergency relief. There were no noted dissents. Several other states, including California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York and Washington, along with many municipalities, have enacted similar laws in the wake of mass shootings around the nation. Recent shootings, including one at a Texas mall that left eight people dead, have prompted calls for further efforts to address gun violence.

The case that reached the Supreme Court was a challenge to a city ordinance in Naperville, Ill., enacted in August and a state law enacted in January. The ordinance prohibited “the commercial sale of assault rifles,” listing 26 categories of weapons, including AK- 47 and AR-15 rifles. The state law covered similar weapons along with high-capacity magazines.

The National Association for Gun Rights, along with Robert Bevis, who owns a firearms store in Naperville, sued to challenge the laws, saying they violated the Second Amendment.

In February, Judge Virginia M. Kendall, of the U.S. District Court in Chicago, denied the plaintiffs’ request for a preliminary injunction, saying that the laws were “consistent with the Second Amendment’s text, history and tradition.”

Kendall, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, acknowledged that the Supreme Court, in striking down a New York law last year that had placed strict limits on gun ownership, had announced a new legal standard for evaluating the constitutionality of gun control laws. She quoted the key passage from Justice Clarence Thomas’ majority opinion in the case, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association vs. Bruen: “When the Second Amendment’s plain text covers an individual’s conduct, the Constitution presumptively protects that conduct. The government must then justify its regulation by demonstrating that it is consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

After a survey of the historical record, Kendall wrote that “assault weapons pose an exceptional danger, more so than standard self-defense weapons such as handguns” and “are used disproportionately in mass shootings, police killings and gang activity.”

Kendall concluded that “the text of the Second Amendment is limited to only certain arms, and history and tradition demonstrate that particularly ‘dangerous’ weapons are unprotected.”