Second Amendment Law Center is excited to announce its district court final judgment victory in FFL-IL v. Pritzker, our challenge to Illinois’s ban on common semiautomatic rifles, pistols, shotguns, and “high capacity” magazines. While three other consolidated lawsuits joined us, only our case challenged Illinois’s registration requirement, and we also prevailed on that aspect of the case.
Judge McGlynn issued a thorough 168-page ruling that applied both the Supreme Court’s Second Amendment precedent and the Seventh Circuit’s more questionable reformulation of it. While Judge McGlynn criticized the Seventh Circuit’s ruling repeatedly, he ultimately concluded that our lawsuit should prevail even under that standard.
Calling the AR-15 the “Rorschach test of America’s gun debate”, Judge McGlynn first explained why it and similar banned firearms and their magazines are undoubtedly “bearable arms” within the scope of the Second Amendment because they are weapons that “an individual carries for the purpose of being armed and ready for offensive or defensive action in a case of conflict with another person.” They are not dangerous because unlike machine guns, they are arms that “a typical operator cannot reasonably control to neutralize discrete, identified aggressors…it is the lack of the ability to discriminately control the arm and its discharged projectiles that makes it dangerous, not its rate of fire.” Nor are they unusual, because they are not designed to inflict “cruel, brutal, or inhumane suffering on a person.”
Perhaps most interestingly, Judge McGlynn eschewed any ownership data in the common use discussion (though he did note that even the State’s own expert admitted millions of Americans own the banned firearms). Rather, common use encompasses “any bearable rifle, shotgun, or pistol that is capable of semiautomatic fire and is or has been available for purchase, possession, and usage by law-abiding citizens for self-defense, provided that it is not otherwise ‘dangerous and unusual.’ ”
The Court then proceeded to answer the three questions the Seventh Circuit requires, concluding that the banned rifles and their magazines (at least those with up to a 30-round capacity) are items “an ordinary person would keep at home for self-defense..” However, he ruled that at .50 caliber rifles, grenade launchers, and belt-fed firearms do not meet that standard, and therefore are unprotected and can be restricted. Second, the banned firearms are not “exclusively or predominantly useful in military service” because, Judge McGlynn explained, they are semiautomatic firearms and not machine guns. But, even if he is wrong, he writes that they fall within the “dual use” exception the Seventh Circuit included in a footnote, for firearms used by civilians and the military, such as the Beretta M9 handgun. Third and finally, the banned firearms are almost always possessed for lawful purposes, as crime with them is rare. While mass shootings are reprehensible crimes, the overwhelming majority of gun owners use their firearms for lawful purposes.
Having found that the banned firearms and magazines are presumptively protected arms, the Court then turned to its historical analysis, in which it criticized the Seventh Circuit’s prior ruling in Bevis. “While Bevis offers several historical examples as evidence of PICA’s congruence with the nation’s history and tradition of firearms regulation, none of these examples are as dispositive as the Seventh Circuit argues, even in light of Rahimi’s interpretation of Bruen’s command.” In response to the treatment of mass shootings as a wholly new phenomenon, Judge McGlynn pointed out that historically, “Native Americans, slaves and freedpeople, and various other “undesirable” groups were frequently victims of mass killings.” Judge McGlynn concluded that he had “taken care to analyze each facet of this case in exacting, excruciating detail in order to generate an Order that is not simply a policy decision in disguise.”
In his conclusion, McGlynn writes that the “oft-quoted phrase that ‘no right is absolute’ does not mean that fundamental rights precariously subsist subject to the whims, caprice, or appetite of government officials or judges.” Moreover, as the “prohibition of firearms is unconstitutional, so is the registration scheme for assault weapons, attachments, and large-capacity magazines.”
The State has already appealed, and it is unclear if the case will now go back to the same three-judge panel that ruled against us on the preliminary injunction 2-1. However, even if it does, Judge Wood, the author of the Bevis ruling, has since retired. So, we will at least have a chance at a more favorable panel on appeal.
