Illinois Supreme Court upholds state’s assault-style weapons ban

By Whitney Wild, CNN

(CNN) — The Illinois Supreme Court on Friday upheld the state’s assault-style weapons ban in a 4-3 ruling after months of legal challenges sought to dismantle the law.

State lawmakers in January passed, and Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed into law, a measure to ban assault-style rifles and high-capacity magazines. Those who already own such rifles face limitations on their sale and transfer and must register them with the Illinois State Police by 2024.

That law – which came about six months after the July 2022 Highland Park, Illinois, shooting – faced immediate lawsuits in state and federal court that argued it violated the Illinois and US constitutions.

A Macon County Circuit Court judge found earlier this year that exemptions to the law, including for law enforcement officers and armed guards at federally supervised nuclear sites, violated the equal protection clause of the state’s constitution.

The Illinois Supreme Court agreed to fast-track the state’s appeal, and in a 20-page opinion, reversed the circuit court’s judgment. The majority’s opinion claimed to focus on two core issues brought by the plaintiffs: Whether the law violated the plaintiffs’ right to equal protection and if it constituted special legislation that created laws for some firearms owners and not others. The majority opinion notably did not decide if the ban violated the Second Amendment, asserting that the plaintiffs had waived this issue.

“We express no opinion on the potential viability of plaintiffs’ waived claim concerning the Second Amendment,” they wrote.

However, one of the plaintiffs’ attorneys, Jerry Stocks, told CNN the majority justices misrepresented their arguments. Stocks said the Second Amendment is a fundamental right inextricably linked to their arguments and thus should have weighed heavily on scrutiny of the ban. Ignoring the issue altogether was improper, he said.

“We have a circus in Illinois and the clowns are in charge right now,” Stocks said.

Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul said the new law is a “critical part” of the state’s efforts to combat gun violence, and Pritzker’s office hailed the decision to uphold “a commonsense gun reform law to keep mass-killing machines off of our streets and out of our schools, malls, parks, and places of worship.”

Nancy Rotering, the Democratic mayor of Highland Park, called on Congress to act on tougher federal restrictions and said Friday’s decision “sends a message to residents that saving lives takes precedence over thoughts and prayers and acknowledges the importance of sensible gun control measures.”

Illinois has struggled to restrict the flow of illegal guns, particularly in Chicago, while officials in the state have faced legal hurdles to implementing new gun restrictions.

Despite gun rights advocates challenging the assault-style weapons ban and asking the US Supreme Court to block the ban – along with a city ordinance passed last year by Naperville, Illinois, that bans the sale of assault rifles – the US Supreme Court in May refused to intervene.

This story has been updated with additional details.

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CNN’s Shania Shelton contributed to this report.