The powerful NRA joined a parade of gun-rights activists searching for to toss out the newly minted prohibition on dozens of rapid-fire pistols and long guns, in addition to large-capacity magazines or attachments.
Two individual gun owners from Benton, nine miles (about 14 kilometers) northeast of St. Louis, are lead plaintiffs within the NRA lawsuit, the second to be filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Illinois. They’re joined by two southern Illinois gun dealers and shooting range operators, in addition to a Connecticut-based shooting sports trade association.
The NRA pleading notes that the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 2008 Heller decision refuses to let stand any restriction on “weapons which are in common use” today unless — one other ruling last summer found — there’s evidence of an “enduring American tradition” of restriction.
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The Illinois law “takes the novel step of banning nearly every modern semiautomatic rifle — the single-most popular variety of rifle within the country, possessed by Americans within the tens of thousands and thousands,” the document says.
The 24 million AR-15 semiautomatic rifles in U.S. circulation far outnumber the 16 million Ford F-150 trucks, the nation’s top-selling vehicle, in keeping with the lawsuit.
Plaintiffs in all of the lawsuits are likely searching for southern Illinois courts due to a stronger disposition toward Second Amendment rights. Guns are viewed way more favorably in central and southern Illinois where there are larger populations of hunters and sport shooters, in comparison with northern metropolitan areas, particularly Chicago, which continues to battle deadly handgun violence.
The NRA-backed lawsuit also argues that the law’s ban on high-capacity ammunition cartridges — not more than 10 rounds for rifles and 15 for pistols — and an extended list of attachments and other accessories, is just as problematic since the weapons in query cannot operate without them, so the add-ons are constitutionally protected “firearms” by inference.
Pritzker and allies nationally discuss with the guns as “assault weapons.” The pleading notes the tradition of bearing arms and features a glossary of terms. It explains that the restricted semiautomatic weapons usually are not machine guns — the expulsion of every round requires a separate squeeze of the trigger.
It points out that detachable magazines date to the Civil War and semiautomatic power is a century old.
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