Specifically, Highland Park’s ordinance banned assault weapons, as well as ammunition magazines that can hold more than ten rounds.
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The Supreme Court on Monday refused to hear a challenge to an IL ordinance that banned semiautomatic assault weapons and large-capacity magazines.
What is clear following the Supreme Court decision is that unlike the victims of its loopholes, California’s assault weapon ban, is still alive.
The city of Highland Park is part of the greater Chicago area and has a long track record of opposing citizens exercising the Second Amendment’s right to keep and bear arms.
In a rare Oval Office address on Sunday, President Obama called for a ban on gun sales to suspected terrorists No Fly List, a scaled-down request that follows more ambitious but failed efforts to pass gun control legislation following Sandy Hook.
In October, the federal appeals court in NY largely upheld bans in CT and NY, among a handful of states that ban semi-automatic weapons.
A spokesman for the National Rifle Association said it’s not surprising that the court did not hear the case, since the vast majority of cases brought before it are not heard.
Kansas doesn’t have any sort of ban on private possession of semi-automatic assault weapons and the Kansas Legislature is overwhelmingly opposed to gun control.
Second Amendment rights continue to face legal challenges.
Pointing to the Supreme Court’s decisions in District of Columbia v. Heller and McDonald v. Chicago – which extended the “personal right to keep and bear arms for lawful purposes, most notably for self-defense within the home” – Thomas said the IL decision treated “the Second Amendment as a second-class right”.
Justice Clarence Thomas isn’t having second thoughts, and he explained why he wanted to overturn the ban in a six-page dissent joined by Justice Antonin Scalia.
The crux of appellate court’s ruling said while the Supreme Court upheld the right of citizens to possess guns that are not unsafe, it allowed individual communities to prohibit firearms that it believes are too risky.
The Illinois State Rifle Association, which filed a lawsuit to challenge the Highland Park law’s constitutionality, said the weapons are in no way unusual. In 2012, a federal appeals court found the IL ban on carrying concealed guns to be unconstitutional.
Maryland, California, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Hawaii all have similar assault weapons bans.
Though not a formal ruling, this decision appears to suggest that the justices don’t view the Second Amendment as protecting a right to own or carry high-powered weapons in public, reported the Los Angeles Times. “Why else are they the weapons of choice in mass shootings?”
“When we drafted the ordinance in the first place, we did it in a way that fell within the teachings of prior United States Supreme Court decisions”, he said.
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“Not that they’re going to decide based on who wins the election, but certainly it seems that guns might be up for debate in this election cycle”, she said.
