WASHINGTON-The Supreme Court let stand a Chicago-area ordinance banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, again declining the chance to explain its view of gun rights following two earlier landmark rulings striking down handgun bans in within the last decade. That ruling noted a statement in the Heller decision that said legislatures retained the ability to prohibit “dangerous and unusual” weapons, and Judge Frank Easterbrook said the guns Highland Park banned qualified.
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The Supreme Court’s decision to stay out of the case came as the country faced a wave of mass shootings, including last week’s killing of 14 people in San Bernardino, Calif., the deadliest terrorist attack in the USA since September 11, 2001.
Lawyers for Dr. Arie Friedman and the Illinois State Rifle Association, who sought to overturn the Highland Park ban, paint an entirely different picture even as to the definition of the weapons at issue. The Supreme Court Monday declined to take up a challenge to a law banning semi-automatic assault weapons and large-capacity magazines in a Chicago suburb.
Though Friedman did not return numerous calls from the Daily North Shore nor respond to any of its emails to comment on the case, Richard Pearson, the executive director of the rifle association, said the Supreme Court action was a blip in the road.
In addition to California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey and NY have similar laws restricting the sale of rapid-fire weapons which carry 10 or more rounds of ammunition.
“The millions of Americans who own so-called “assault weapons” use them for the same lawful purposes as any other type of firearm: hunting, recreational shooting, and self-defense”, he wrote, adding that the firearms are “almost never used for crime” because criminals “far prefer” ordinary handguns that are easier to carry and hide.
In April, a divided three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, in Chicago, upheld the Highland Park ordinance.
Since then, the justices have repeatedly refused to hear appeals from gun-rights advocates who have sought to extend the 2nd Amendment right to protect the carrying of weapons in public. That city banned semiautomatic weapons and large-capacity magazines in 2013. They said the court was turning the Second Amendment of the Constitution into a “second-class right”.
The gun control laws that the appeals court in NY upheld in October were passed after the 2012 massacre in Newtown. Those opinions, decided by 5-4 votes along the court’s conservative-liberal divide, affirmed that some regulations of gun possession were permissible, such as bans on concealed weapons or possession of firearms by the mentally ill.
Friedman filed an appeal with the high court in July, which won the backing of the National Rifle Assn. and the state attorneys from 23 mostly Republican-led states.
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Had the high court struck down the Highland Park ordinance, its decision would likely have voided all the state laws as well. “They have upheld severe restrictions on the right to keep and bear arms that would be unthinkable in the context of any other constitutional right”.
