By Dave Workman
Senior Editor
Illinois gun rights advocates scored a small but significant victory when the State Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the ban on so-called “assault weapons” in Cook County can be challenged.
A county ordinance dating back to 1993 prohibits the possession of these semiautomatic firearms. In 2006, the ordinance was expanded to include high-capacity magazines, which have since been dubbed “assault magazines” by the anti-gun lobby. The case was partly remanded back to the trial court.
Alan Gottlieb, chairman of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, said the ruling “opens the door” for a court to decide that modern semiautomatic sport-utility rifles – so often demonized as “assault rifles” – are protected by the Second Amendment.
Gun prohibition groups, including the Brady Center for the Prevention of Gun Violence and the Legal Community Against Gun Violence decried the ruling.
The opinion, written by Justice Mary Jane Theis, acknowledged that “Without a national uniform definition of assault weapons from which to judge these weapons, it cannot be ascertained at this stage of the proceedings whether these arms with these particular attributes as defined in this Ordinance are well suited for self-defense or sport or would be outweighed completely by the collateral damage resulting from their use…”
She further noted that, “neither can we say conclusively at this early stage of the litigation that assault weapons as defined in this Ordinance categorically fall outside the scope of the rights protected by the Second Amendment. Heller explicitly recognized a historical and long-standing tradition of firearms regulations prohibiting a category of ‘dangerous and unusual weapons’ that are ‘not typically possessed by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes’.”
The task now facing the plaintiffs is to prove that these firearms are in common use, or at least would be if there were no ban in place. Outside of the few states or local regions where bans have been imposed, ownership of such rifles has been steadily increasing the past few years. Nearly all major long-gun manufacturers have at least one version of a modern sporting rifle in their product lineup, and many of these companies have adapted the basic platform to accommodate new big game calibers for hunting.
The state high court sent the case back to a lower court judge who had initially thrown out the challenge, which was filed by three Cook County residents, Joseph Messineo, Troy Edhlund and Matthew D. Wilson, for whom the case – Wilson v. Cook County – is named.
The Chicago Sun Times called it a “victory for gun rights advocates” and the Chicago Tribune concurred, reporting that gun rights advocates had “scored a victory.”
