| How the US gun lobby managed to lose a crucial Supreme Court battle |
Following gun lobby urging, the Illinois legislature had was ready to legislate to block local assault weapon ban laws entirely at the local level. It gave the cities and towns of the state 10 days to pass assault weapons and other gun legislation before the overriding ban became law.
It was a now-or-never situation and Highland Park, along with other towns, went for now, passing the law in a day and in a rush.
Following gun lobby urging, the Illinois legislature had was ready to legislate to block local assault weapon ban laws entirely at the local level. It gave the cities and towns of the state 10 days to pass assault weapons and other gun legislation before the overriding ban became law.
It was a now-or-never situation and Highland Park, along with other towns, went for now, passing the law in a day and in a rush.
Partly because of that manoeuvre, the gun lobby had a serious setback on Monday when the Supreme Court let stand Highland Park's law and an appeals court ruling upholding it, giving a green legal light, or perhaps a yellow one, to other cities and towns to enact their own ordinances if so inclined politically.
While the court issued no ruling and set no precedent when it acted, it was nonetheless a serious defeat for groups like the National Rifle Association, which argue that the Supreme Court's 2008 ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller, upholding the individual right to bear arms under the Second Amendment, should be read in the most expansive fashion, barring bans on even the most lethal of automatic weapons. The gun lobby was counting on the court to block what it sees as a wave of decisions flouting that ruling.
The NRA, in its submission to the court, said it was "critical" that the justices take up the case.
"In the seven years since that opinion was handed down," the Illinois Rifle Association complained when it petitioned the court to review Highland Park's law, "the lower courts have assiduously worked to sap" the Heller ruling "of any real meaning. They have upheld severe restrictions on the right to keep and bear arms that would be unthinkable in the context of any other constitutional right."
It was time, the gun rights group said, for the court to act.
Yet it could be said that the Illinois Rifle Association inadvertently spurred the Highland Park law.
In June of 2013, the Illinois legislature passed a concealed carry law, after its ban on concealed weapons permits was struck down by a federal court.
But when it passed the bill, at the urging of the gun lobby and its supporters, it embedded a provision that no court had mandated: an anti-home rule ban on cities and towns of Illinois enacting their own new laws outlawing assault weapons. It gave the municipalities a grace period of exactly 10 days from the signing of the bill to pass such laws, confident that none, or few, would dare in part because as Glenview Village Board President Jim Patterson said at the time, "it could provoke litigation in opposition that the village would then have to pay for".
The provision pre-empting local legislation, while a staple of the National Rifle Association's agenda for the states, was an affront to many of the cities and towns in Illinois which, apart from the gun issue itself, coveted the legislative autonomy they had in many areas of law enforcement. Indeed, the anti-home rule provision and its short grace period were red flags.
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