Background
In 2023, six months after a mass shooting at a Highland Park parade killed seven people, Illinois enacted the Protect Illinois Communities Act, which criminalizes the manufacture, sale, and possession of assault weapons and large-capacity magazines. The law includes a grandfather clause permitting preexisting lawful owners to retain such items upon registration. Gun owners and firearms dealers challenged the Act’s constitutionality under the Second Amendment, seeking declaratory and injunctive relief. After a preliminary injunction was initially granted, the district court held a four-day bench trial and concluded that much of the Act violated the Second Amendment and that its provisions were not severable, thereby enjoining the Act in its entirety.
The case came before the Seventh Circuit in the shadow of the circuit’s prior decision in Bevis v. City of Naperville (2023), which had held at the preliminary injunction stage that plaintiffs were unlikely to succeed on their Second Amendment challenges. That decision applied the Supreme Court’s framework from New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen, which requires courts to first determine whether conduct falls within the Second Amendment’s plain text and, if so, whether the government can justify the regulation as consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.
The Court’s Holding
The Seventh Circuit reversed the district court’s injunction. Assuming arguendo that AR-15s and thirty-round rifle magazines qualify as “Arms” presumptively protected by the Second Amendment’s plain text, the court held that Illinois’s restrictions on these items satisfy the second step of the Bruen test by being consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation. The court emphasized that legislatures have long imposed restrictions on particularly dangerous weapons and noted that a strong circuit consensus now exists supporting this conclusion across multiple recent decisions.
The panel focused on historical regulations targeting especially dangerous weapons as supporting the modern restriction. Drawing on historical examples including nineteenth-century Bowie knife regulations, machine gun bans, and pre-Founding going-armed laws, the court concluded that a coherent regulatory tradition existed justifying targeted restrictions on weapons whose danger and lethality stand out. The court further noted that the Supreme Court’s recent decision in United States v. Rahimi clarified that modern firearm regulations do not require close founding-era comparators, lending additional support to the government’s historical showing.
Key Takeaways
- AR-15 rifles and thirty-round magazine restrictions are constitutional when justified under the historical tradition of regulating particularly dangerous weapons.
- The Second Amendment protects certain firearms, but that protection is not unlimited; states retain authority to restrict weapons outside the scope of lawful self-defense.
- Every circuit court to address assault weapons and large-capacity magazines has reached agreement that such restrictions are permissible, creating uniform national precedent on the issue.
- Historical regulations of weapons perceived as especially dangerous—from Bowie knives to machine guns—provide valid analogues for modern firearm restrictions under the Bruen framework.
Why It Matters
This decision resolves a significant split between district courts in Illinois that had reached opposite conclusions on the same Act. By reversing the district court’s blanket injunction, the Seventh Circuit clarifies that the Second Amendment, while protecting an individual right to bear arms, does not preclude state legislatures from restricting weapons deemed particularly dangerous. The decision reflects a growing circuit consensus that Bruen’s historical tradition prong accommodates modern firearm regulations targeting semi-automatic rifles and high-capacity magazines.
For practitioners and policymakers, the decision suggests that assault weapons restrictions are likely constitutional and that the focus of future litigation will center on fact-intensive questions about whether particular weapons fall within the Second Amendment’s scope in the first instance, rather than on whether historical traditions support their regulation. The opinion also signals that courts applying Bruen should look beyond precise eighteenth-century comparators to broader historical principles regarding dangerous weapons, potentially opening pathways for other modern firearm regulations to withstand constitutional challenge.