IL court: 6-day injunction vs IL gun ban didn’t let people own banned guns

OTTAWA, ILLINOIS - Despite a federal judge's short-lived injunction, blocking the state of Illinois from enforcing its ban on so-called "assault weapons" for a week, Illinois gun owners still couldn't legally purchase and register firearms or accessories banned by the law during the time the injunction was in effect, a state appeals panel has ruled.

On May 23, a three-justice panel of the Illinois Third District Appellate Court rejected an attempt by a Will County man to force Illinois state officials to allow him to legally bring home to Illinois and register certain firearms he reportedly purchased during a one-week period in which a federal judge's court order appeared to allow the purchases to still be legal, despite a constitutionally questionable Illinois state law forbidding the purchases.

In the ruling, the appeals panel said the federal injunction was too short-lived to allow Illinois gun owners to take actions that would otherwise violate the gun ban law.

"We have no reason to dispute that the ... injunction was a valid court order and we recognize the well-established legal principle that plaintiff cites - that a valid court order must be obeyed until it is set aside by the issuing or reviewing court," the Third District justices wrote in their order. "However, we fail to see how the ... injunction would allow plaintiff to possess and register the weapons at issue, despite the restrictions contained in the (state law.)

"There is no dispute in this case that the ... injunction was stayed less than a week after it was issued and that it was ultimately vacated by the federal appeals court. Thus, consistent with the legal principle that plaintiff cites, the ... injunction provides no legal basis upon which to currently prohibit defendants (the state of Illinois) from enforcing the Act's possession restrictions to the assault weapons that plaintiff had purchased because the ... injunction had been set aside."

The decision was authored by Third District Appellate Justice Peterson. Justices Davenport and Bertani concurred in the ruling.

The case landed in Will County Circuit Court in Chicago's southwest suburbs when plaintiff Ian D. Reece filed suit, with the backing of Second Amendment rights advocacy group, the Illinois State Rifle Association.

The case centered on the state's declaration that Reece and potentially other gun owners were still in violation of Illinois' "assault weapons" ban, even though they had purchased their weapons under a valid federal court order blocking the state from enforcing its gun ban for six days in 2023.

The gun ban law, dubbed by Illinois Democrats officially as the Protect Illinois Communities Act (PICA), was signed into law by Gov. JB Pritzker in January 2023 and took effect Jan. 1, 2024.

The law includes several provisions banning a long list of semiautomatic firearms and so-called "large capacity magazines," which the state defined as ammunition magazines which can hold more than 10 rounds.

Pritzker and other supporters of the law say it is needed to reduce future mass shootings, such as the massacre carried out by a lone gunman possessing an "assault rifle" at the 2022 Fourth of July parade in suburban Highland Park.

Second Amendment rights supporters, however, say the law is a blatant violation of the Second Amendment, particularly as interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court in recent decisions known as District of Columbia v Heller and New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v Bruen.

In those decisions, the Supreme Court created tests for states and courts to use when evaluating if such restrictions are constitutional. Those tests require courts and lawmakers to evaluate if the weapons being banned are both dangerous and unusual, and if the restrictions are in keeping with U.S. history and tradition dating back to the ratification of the Second Amendment in 1791 and the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868.

Attempts to block the law have largely failed to this point, as both the Illinois Supreme Court and the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals have either rejected challenges to the law or refused to order the state to stop enforcing the law while constitutional challenges have played out.

The Seventh Circuit has notably ruled they believed Illinois is likely to prevail against legal challenges because they believe state lawmakers should be able to ban any weapons they wish without violating the Second Amendment's right to keep and bear arms, if the lawmakers determine the weapons are similar enough to "military" weaponry.

To this point, the U.S. Supreme Court also has declined to step in and either block the state from enforcing the law or declare the law unconstitutional.

The question over the law's constitutionality has returned to the Seventh Circuit court, after Southern Illinois U.S. District Judge Stephen McGlynn declared the PICA law unconstitutional. The appeals court has not shown any interest in moving ahead with considering that appeal expeditiously, as briefing continues.

The Seventh Circuit has also allowed Illinois to continue enforcing the gun ban, despite McGlynn's ruling.

However, amid all of the various larger legal challenges, McGlynn in April 2023 was the first and only judge to issue an injunction blocking the state from enforcing the PICA law.

That injunction remained in effect for six days, before the Seventh Circuit also granted a request from Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul to pause and ultimately vacate McGlynn's injunction.

The Seventh Circuit's order to stay McGlynn's injunction came despite giving plaintiffs any opportunity to respond to Raoul's request in court.

McGlynn's injunction, however, set off a week-long buying spree at Illinois gun stores, which reportedly sold out of many items that the PICA law had banned. Reportedly, gun owners hoped purchases made during the injunction period would be legally treated as if they had been made before the gun ban law took effect.

If so, they would have been included under the PICA law's so-called grandfather clause, which would allow any otherwise banned weapons to continue to be owned in Illinois, so long as owners could prove they had been purchased before the law's effective date and the owners registered the weapons with the Illinois State Police.

According to court documents, Reece legally purchased "an assault weapon and some attachments ... that were covered by (PICA)."

However, after the Seventh Circuit removed the injunction, the state of Illinois, through Raoul's office announced the state would refuse to honor those injunction-week purchases, saying the state would refuse to allow owners to legally register their weapons because the weapons had remained illegal to own during the injunction period, despite McGlynn's ruling.

That declaration prompted Reece, with ISRA, to file suit in the pursuit of a court order directing the state to honor the injunction period purchases. Reece did not challenge the constitutionality of the gun ban law, but rather only the state's refusal to consider McGlynn's injunction to have been valid.

In court, however, Will County Judge John Anderson refused to do so, saying McGlynn's injunction essentially didn't matter and the state could safely proceed as if the injunction had never happened when receiving requests from gun owners seeking to register firearms they purchased during that six-day period.

And on appeal, the Third District panel backed Anderson's determination.

According to court documents, Reece is not required to surrender the weapons he purchased to the state, as he has opted to store them out of state while his court challenge played out. However, the ruling means Reece cannot legally register or bring those weapons into Illinois, because he purchased the weapons after Illinois' gun ban law took effect, regardless of Judge McGlynn's injunction.

The state appellate justices agreed with Raoul that any difficulties Reece and other gun owners may experience under their legal reasoning is their own fault, "the result of .... choosing to purchase the weapons despite the uncertainty involved."