Gun Owners of America, Inc., et al. v. Kwame Raoul, Attorney General of Illinois, et al.

This Court’s decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1 (2022), triggered several states to enact retaliatory measures designed not just to negate the protections for gun rights afforded by Bruen, but to clamp down on the right to keep and bear arms even more than before Bruen was decided. Illinois responded to Bruen with a law that bans millions of the most commonly owned firearms and ammunition magazines in the nation. After a district court enjoined this patently unconstitutional statute, a panel of the Seventh Circuit became the first federal appellate court to uphold such a law after Bruen, over a strong dissent. Concluding that the Second Amendment’s two clauses have no relation to one another, the Seventh Circuit contrived an atextual and ahistorical distinction between “military-grade weaponry” and “civilian weaponry,” asserting that millions of common arms are “similar” enough to “military weapons” that they fall on “the military side of that line” and thus are not “Arms” at all. The question presented is: Whether Illinois’ categorical ban on millions of the most commonly owned firearms and ammunition magazines in the nation, including the AR-15 rifle, violates the Second Amendment.