Appeals court upholds Illinois’ ban on assault weapons, high-capacity magazines

CHICAGO — A federal appeals court on Thursday upheld Illinois’ 2023 assault weapons ban pushed by Democrats in the wake of the July 4, 2022, mass shooting during an Independence Day parade in Chicago’s northern suburb of Highland Park.

Thursday’s 2-1 decision overturns a lower court ruling that found the law unconstitutional in late 2024 after a weeklong bench trial. But the 7^th Circuit Court of Appeals’ opinion is unlikely the last word on the state’s assault weapons ban; just last week, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to take up a case examining similar laws in both Cook County and Connecticut.

For now, though, the appellate panel’s majority has ruled Illinois’ law, which also bans high-capacity magazines, is “consistent with our regulatory tradition” in the U.S., during which “legislatures have long imposed restrictions on particularly dangerous weapons.”

“In short, whatever else may be contributing to America’s mass-shooting epidemic, the record makes one thing clear: The more people killed, the more likely it is that the killer used an assault weapon and large-capacity magazines,” Judge Amy St. Eve wrote.

The Highland Park parade shooter killed seven people and injured dozens more using an AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle and three 30-round magazines, allowing him to fire 83 shots over a period of just 40 seconds.

Roughly six months after the massacre, Democratic lawmakers, joined by a few Republicans, pushed through the assault weapons ban during the General Assembly’s “lame duck” session in early 2023, and Gov. JB Pritzker quickly signed it into law. Since then, the law has been challenged in a variety of venues but has largely survived the barrage of litigation against it.

In a social media post Thursday, Pritzker praised the ruling as “A victory in the fight to end gun violence that helps keep our communities safe” from “assault weapons and high-capacity magazines capable of inflicting mass casualties.” Attorney General Kwame Raoul, whose office has defended the law for the entirety of its 3 ½-year lifespan, boasted the ruling was “a win that enhances public safety in Illinois.”

“We have seen the damage that assault weapons and large-capacity magazines can inflict, and these weapons of war have no place in our communities,” Raoul said in a statement.

State Rep. Bob Morgan, D-Deerfield, who led the charge for the assault weapons ban after having to run for his life during the mass shooting at the parade, touted the law as having “already led to record lows of gun violence and mass shootings.”

“We are saving lives in Illinois with our assault weapon ban, and will continue to pursue all options available to end the scourge of gun violence in our state,” Morgan said in a statement.

Historical tradition of firearms regulation

St. Eve, who was nominated to the appellate bench by President Donald Trump during his first term, wrote on behalf of herself and Judge Frank Easterbrook, a former chief judge of the 7th Circuit, who was nominated by President Ronald Reagan. Her 44-page opinion reasoned that Illinois’ assault weapons ban law was in line with the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 2022 decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen.

In that case, the high court’s conservative majority laid out a novel legal test for gun restrictions, ruling that in order to conform with the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms, laws must be rooted in the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation — specifically laws that existed in the late 1790s when the Bill of Rights was ratified.

Since then, the U.S. Supreme Court has made one major ruling upholding a restriction on firearm ownership in a 2024 decision finding a federal law prohibiting possession of firearms for those subject to domestic violence restraining orders. That 8-1 decision also clarified that for gun control laws to pass the test laid out in the Bruen decision, there doesn’t need to be a “dead ringer” or “historical twin” law from the nation’s founding era, just that a modern gun restriction must “comport with the principles underlying the Second Amendment.”

In that spirit, Thursday’s 7^th Circuit opinion found arguments from the assault weapons ban’s supporters that the law — formally known as the Protect Illinois Communities Act — protects Illinois communities as far too general a justification that wouldn’t comport with the nation’s historical tradition of firearms regulation.

But, St. Eve wrote, the other justification given, that the law “protects the public from weapons that pose a special danger to its safety,” is more specific and “is consistent with the rationales underlying the historical regulations” in gun ownership. The majority relied on a 2008 U.S. Supreme Court’s 2008 decision finding that while the Second Amendment granted Americans the right to own handguns, military-style firearms like the M-16 issued to enlisted soldiers can be banned. Thursday’s opinion also relied on a more recent decision finding very little difference between an M-16 and an AR-15.

“There is no dispute that when chambered with identical bullets, the AR15 and the M16 fire rounds at approximately the same velocity — about 3,100 feet, or ten football fields, per second,” St. Eve wrote, noting the guns’ power was roughly three times the velocity of a bullet fired from a standard handgun, and have 10 times the effective range as a handgun.

The judge went on to cite the AR-15 and M-16’s much larger “wounding capabilities” compared with a handgun, as bullets from a semi-automatic weapon are more likely “to rotate within the body and potentially fragment, which causes additional damage to tissue and organs adjacent to the bullet’s entry point.” She also noted that “large-capacity magazines amplify each and every one of the AR-15’s dangerous characteristics by allowing a shooter to fire more of these lethal rounds without breaking to reload.”

But St. Eve stressed that she wasn’t bringing up the relative dangerousness of assault-style weapons compared with handguns in order to justify the “the gravity of the harms the legislation was designed to avert,” but to make a historical comparison from a pre-Civil war court ruling on one of the most dangerous weapons of the era: the Bowie knife.

The weapon, popularized in the 1830s, is large sheath knife with a blade usually measuring between 6 and 12 inches with a “clipped point,” which makes the tip of the blade “more piercing,” the judge wrote, capable of wreaking “particularly bloody and gruesome injuries.”

Thursday’s opinion cited an 1859 court ruling calling the Bowie knife an “instrument of almost certain death.” In response, “legislatures responded accordingly,” St. Eve wrote, banning the carry and even the sale of Bowie knives, with “criminal prohibitions that often authorized imprisonment.”

As such, the appellate court majority ruled that Illinois’ assault weapons ban “is akin to that seen in our history and tradition.”

“Our ancestors regulated particularly dangerous weapons for sufficiently specific similar reasons as Illinois is regulating AR-15s and large-capacity magazines,” St. Eve wrote.

7^th Circuit Chief Judge Michael Brennan, who also appointed to the appeals court during Trump’s first term, wrote in a 50-page dissent that the majority should not ignore the popularity of assault-style rifles among Americans.

“Our Nation’s enduring traditions forbid governments from prohibiting firearms commonly owned for self-defense,” Brennan wrote. “Because the people have overwhelmingly chosen the AR-15 rifle and its magazine as their weapon of choice, they are protected by the Second Amendment.”

Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.

Hannah Meisel

Hannah has been covering Illinois government and politics since 2014, and since then has worked for a variety of outlets from NPR affiliate stations to a startup newsletter. She’s a graduate of both the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the U of I’s Springfield campus, where she received an M.A. through the Public Affairs Reporting program and got her start reporting in the Capitol.