SPRINGFIELD — A recent decision from a local appellate court in Washington, D.C., striking down a ban on large-capacity magazines could have an impact on a pending case challenging a similar ban in Illinois.
In a memo filed March 11 with the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago, lawyers for the gun industry asked a three-judge panel hearing the Illinois challenge to consider the case of Tyree Benson. His conviction for violating a local ordinance banning large-capacity magazines was recently overturned by the Washington, D.C., Court of Appeals on Second Amendment grounds.
But Attorney General Kwame Raoul’s office responded Wednesday, arguing the 7th Circuit is not bound by decisions of the D.C. court — the equivalent of a state supreme court. It also described the Benson decision as an “outlier that conflicts with every other appellate court to have addressed the issue.”
At issue before the 7th Circuit is a constitutional challenge to the Protect Illinois Communities Act, or PICA, a sweeping ban on assault-style weapons and large-capacity magazines.
Illinois lawmakers passed that ban during a lame duck session in January 2023 following a mass shooting the previous summer at a Fourth of July parade in Highland Park that left seven people dead and dozens more injured or traumatized.
The convicted gunman in that shooting used a Smith & Wesson M&P15 semiautomatic rifle and multiple 30-round magazines.
In November 2024, a federal judge in East St. Louis sided with gun rights advocates and the gun industry and struck down the Illinois law as unconstitutional. The state has appealed that decision to the 7th Circuit, which heard oral arguments in September but has not yet rendered a decision. The law remains in effect while the appeal is pending.
Many legal observers say the case is likely to end up before the U.S. Supreme Court, which has never issued a definitive ruling on assault weapons bans. The court did, however, deny requests to issue preliminary injunctions blocking the law from being enforced while legal challenges proceeded.
Shifting standards
In other Second Amendment cases in recent years, the court has taken a more expansive view of the right to bear arms and has been broadly skeptical of state and local laws that seek to limit that right.
In 2008, the court ruled in District of Columbia v. Heller that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to bear arms, as opposed to a collective societal right to maintain a militia. In striking down an ordinance banning the possession of handguns in the district, the court also said the Second Amendment protection extends to “all instruments that constitute bearable arms, even those that were not in existence at the time of the founding.”
More recently, in 2022’s New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen decision, the court went further by saying the Second Amendment gives all Americans the right to bear “commonly used” arms in public. It also said that to pass constitutional muster, a law limiting the right to bear arms had to be “consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”
Benson decision
In the case of Tyree Benson, the Washington, D.C., court ruled 2-1 that magazines of any capacity are “arms” covered by the Second Amendment. It also said large-capacity magazines in particular “are ubiquitous in our country, numbering in the hundreds of millions, accounting for about half of the magazines in the hands of our citizenry, and they come standard with the most popular firearms sold in America today.”
Erin Murphy, an attorney for a firm representing several plaintiffs in the Illinois case, argued in the memo that the popularity of large-capacity magazines put them in the same category as handguns, which the Supreme Court said in the Heller decision could not be banned.
But Assistant Attorney General Megan Brown argued in a reply memo that relying on the popularity of a particular weapon or device to determine whether it’s constitutionally protected represented a kind of circular logic that the 7th Circuit rejected when it denied a motion to block enforcement of the assault weapons ban in 2023.
The 7th Circuit has not indicated when it intends to issue a decision.
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