WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Wednesday declined to block two Illinois laws banning the sale of high-powered weapons and high-capacity magazines as challenges continue to face them.
The court’s brief order was unmotivated, which is typical when the court responds to requests for emergency assistance. There were no known dissents.
Several other states, including California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Washington, along with many municipalities, have enacted similar laws in the wake of mass shootings across the country. Recent shootings, including one at a Texas mall that killed eight people, have prompted calls for further efforts to tackle gun violence.
The case that made it to the Supreme Court challenged a city ordinance in Naperville, Illinois, that went into effect in August and a state law that went into effect in January. The ordinance banned “the commercial sale of assault rifles,” listing 26 categories of weapons, including AK-47 and AR-15 rifles. State law covered similar weapons along with high-capacity magazines.
The National Gun Rights Association, along with Robert Bevis, who owns a gun store in Naperville, to challenge the laws, saying they violated the Second Amendment.
In February, Judge Virginia M. Kendallof the Federal District Court at Chicago, rejected plaintiffs’ request for a preliminary injunctionsaying the laws were “consistent with the text, history, and tradition of the Second Amendment.”
Judge Kendall, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, acknowledged that when the Supreme Court last year struck down a New York law that had placed strict restrictions on gun ownership, it had announced a new legal standard for reviewing the constitutionality of gun control laws .
She quoted the key passage from Judge Clarence Thomas’s majority opinion on the case: New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen: “If the plaintext of the Second Amendment pertains to an individual’s conduct, the Constitution presumably protects that conduct. The government must then justify its regulation by demonstrating that it is consistent with the country’s historical tradition of firearms regulation.”
After reviewing the historical record, Judge Kendall wrote that “assault weapons pose an exceptional danger, more so than standard self-defense weapons such as handguns” and are “used disproportionately in mass shootings, police killings and gang activity.”
Judge Kendall concluded that “the text of the Second Amendment is limited to only certain weapons, and history and tradition show that particularly ‘dangerous’ weapons are unprotected.”
The federal appeals court in Chicago declined to block the laws as an appeal against Judge Kendall’s ruling continues.
In asking the Supreme Court to intervenethe plaintiffs said that “this is an extremely simple case.”
“The Second Amendment,” they wrote, “protects guns commonly possessed by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes, especially self-defense in the home.”
The letter quoted a 2015 dissenting opinion from Judge Thomas, who said the Supreme Court should not have rejected a petition in a prohibition case similar to the one in the new case.
“About five million Americans own AR-style semi-automatic rifles,” Judge Thomas wrote at the time, referring to, he said, “modern sporting rifles.”
“The vast majority of citizens who own and use such guns do so for lawful purposes, including self-defense and target practice,” Judge Thomas wrote. “According to our precedents, that’s all citizens need to have the right under the Second Amendment to keep such guns.”
Prosecutors urged judges to act quickly, saying the laws are “literally destroying Mr. Bevis’ livelihood” by banning 85 percent of the firearms his shop sells.
In answerNaperville attorneys wrote that the banned firearms pose exceptional dangers, saying that “criminals engaged in mass shootings predominantly use assault weapons — not other firearms.”
In their own short, state officials told the judges that the characteristics of the prohibited firearms “make them ideally suited as a weapon of war, but are not in common use or suitable for personal self-defense.”
The historical evidence, the briefing said, supported the state law.
“During the founding era, Americans typically owned militia muskets and fowl guns for bird hunting and vermin control,” the brief said. “Single-shot, barrel-loading firearms remained the standard weapon through the Civil War.”