Firearms Owners Against Crime
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
An emergency application filed with Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked the court to intervene and issue an injunction against two separate “assault weapons” bans in Illinois pending appellate review.
One of the two bans is the state-level Protect Illinois Communities Act (PICA), which has been the subject of many lawsuits since being signed by Gov. JB Pritzker (D) on January 10.
The second of the two bans is a city-level ban in Naperville, Illinois.
The issue in the case is:
Can the government ban the sale, purchase, and possession of certain semi-automatic firearms and firearm magazines tens of millions of which are possessed by law-abiding American for lawful purposes when there is no analogous historical ban as required in D.C. v. Heller (2008)…and New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022).
The application goes on to note that the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois Eastern Division decided against plaintiffs on February 17, 2023.
Plaintiffs claim the district court “refused to the address the Heller/Bruen rule that a categorical ban of commonly held arms in constitutional,” suggesting the district court did not question the existence of such a rule but “ignored it.”
The application says, “The [district] court went off the rails and invented out of whole cloth the ‘particularly dangerous weapon’ doctrine. Under the district court’s new doctrine, weapons that a court judges to be ‘particularly dangerous’ are unprotected by the Second Amendment.”
Plaintiffs countered the district court by noting, “The Second Amendment protects arms that are commonly possessed by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes, especially self-defense in the home.” They point again to Bruen(2022) and Heller (2008) to bolster their claim.
The application is Bevis v. Naperville and the State of Illinois, No. 22A948, in the Supreme Court of the United States.