FPC Statement on Seventh Circuit Decision Upholding Illinois Assault Weapons and Large-Capacity Magazine Bans
Firearms Policy Coalition (FPC) President Brandon Combs issued the following statement responding to the Seventh Circuit’s opinion in FPC’s Harrel v. Raoul lawsuit (consolidated with Barnett v. Raoul and others) challenging the Illinois Protect Illinois Communities Act (PICA) bans on so-called “assault weapons” and “large-capacity” magazines. The district court declared the bans unconstitutional following extensive briefing, presentation of evidence, and a trial, but the Seventh Circuit reversed that ruling today:
“Today’s decision is exactly what we’ve come to expect from courts desperately contorting themselves to keep failed gun-control theories alive. While the opinion is unquestionably atrocious in both its legal reasoning and moral foundation, the good news is that today’s opinion is not the future of Second Amendment jurisprudence but the death rattle of the failed gun-control era—the last gasp of a dying authoritarian legal movement that has spent years engaging in judicial jiggery-pokery, inventing exceptions, rewriting history, misrepresenting reality, and treating the Second Amendment like a second-class right.
Just days ago, the Supreme Court granted review in FPC’s Viramontes v. Cook County case, which squarely presents the issue these lower courts keep working so hard to avoid. That grant of certiorari was not an accident. It is a recognition that the confusion and open defiance in the lower courts—exemplified yet again by today’s Seventh Circuit decision—cannot and must not continue.
The Constitution does not permit governments to outlaw these firearms and magazines, full stop. Nor does it allow judges to substitute their personal policy preferences for the scope of the right the Constitution enshrined, or to ignore the test the Supreme Court has repeatedly required. The Supreme Court now has the opportunity to restore order to a body of law that some lower courts have treated as optional. When it does, opinions like this will serve as little more than historical reminders of how far some courts were willing to go to deny Americans the exercise of a fundamental constitutional right.
For years, anti-rights governments have benefited from some judges willing to do whatever it took to preserve their unconstitutional and immoral bans. They’ve won some battles along the way. But we are going to win the war.
FPC is going to achieve our Current Mission which is to restore the essential right to keep and bear arms throughout the United States. We will continue to Fight Forward until every unconstitutional arms ban falls and the Second Amendment is treated like every other constitutional guarantee—not as a suggestion, but as the supreme law of the land.” Read more
