The US Supreme Court has refused to take up a case brought by gun owners challenging an IL city’s ban on so-called assault weapons.
Advertisement
At issue in Friedman v. City of Highland Park is that IL city’s ban on the sale and possession of “assault weapons” and of gun magazines that hold more than 10 rounds.
Thomas scolded the 7th Circuit, saying its decision eviscerated individual gun ownership rights as defined by the Constitution and the Supreme Court, which a local municipality does not have the authority to overrule.
The court’s decision was not a formal ruling – the justices simply decided not to consider an appeal by gun rights advocates.
Bans on rapid-fire weapons have been upheld by federal appeals courts in San Francisco and NY in addition to the 7th Circuit panel that upheld the Highland Park ordinance. It also may be true that some uncertainty has developed among one or more of the Justices in that five-member majority, so there is no dependable way to predict how a new decision would come out.
The court’s latest refusal to intervene in a Second Amendment case comes as President Barack Obama and other Democrats are calling for new gun control measures in the wake of last week’s terrorist attack in California.
“If Kansas were to have an assault weapons ban, it (the Supreme Court decision) would still only be just a persuasive argument for any court that would have jurisdiction”, Jackson said. The association is a plaintiff in the Highland Park case.
In the minority’s dissension, Judge Daniel A. Manion wrote that “by prohibiting a class of weapons commonly used throughout the country, Highland Park’s ordinance infringes upon the rights of its citizens to keep weapons in their homes for the goal of defending themselves, their families and their property”.
They also pointed out that seven states, including California and NY, have similar laws on the books.
Thomas said the high court should have heard the appeal of that ruling in order to prevent that appeals court “from relegating the Second Amendment to a second-class right”.
In Texas, where the Legislature spent months recently working on new laws expanding gun rights, the notion that some places might want to restrict them seems downright freakish. In fact, gun-control advocates have used Scalia’s own words to stress that, “the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited”.
There will no doubt be more cases testing the limits of the right to own guns, but this ruling suggests that many state and local restrictions are going to stand, which means that on gun laws, we’ll continue to move toward two systems of regulation, one in blue states and one in red states.
Even so, the Highland Park case that they passed up on Monday was not like most of the others that have been denied review. The federal appeals court in Chicago had upheld the ban.
Advertisement
Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia said the court should review the ban, which “flouts” the court’s Second Amendment jurisprudence. You could make the argument that we’ve won.
