Multiple news outlets are reporting that the NRA has filed suit to attempt to overturn Illinois’ two-week-old ban on semiautomatic weapons.
According to the court filing Wednesday, the new Illinois law outlaws “ubiquitous” firearms in “radical” defiance of the Constitution’s Second Amendment, a federal lawsuit filed by the National Rifle Association Tuesday claims.
Governor J.B. Pritzker signed the law Jan. 10 in response to the shooting deaths of seven at the Fourth of July parade in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park, where 30 were also injured. He has said he believes the law will withstand court challenges about its constitutionality.
The powerful gun-lobby group, the NRA joined a parade of gun-rights activists seeking to toss out the newly minted prohibition on dozens of rapid-fire pistols and long guns, as well as large-capacity magazines or attachments.
Two individual gun owners from Benton, nine miles (about 14 kilometers) northeast of St. Louis, are lead plaintiffs in the NRA lawsuit, the second to be filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Illinois. They are joined by two southern Illinois gun dealers and shooting range operators, as well as a Connecticut-based shooting sports trade association.
The NRA pleading notes that the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 2008 Heller decision refuses to let stand any restriction on “weapons that are in common use” today unless — another ruling last summer found — there is evidence of an “enduring American tradition” of restriction.
The Illinois law “takes the radical step of banning nearly every modern semiautomatic rifle — the single-most popular type of rifle in the country, possessed by Americans in the tens of millions,” the document says.
