This case has wider implications than just in Illinois. The SCOTUS is showing itself to be emphatic, insisting that its rulings be applied.

On May 1, Justice Amy Coney Barrett directed the State of Illinois and the City of Naperville to respond to the emergency application for injunction pending appellate review filed by the National Association for Gun Rights (NAGR).  As I explained in “An Opening Judicial Salvo in Defense of Illinois’ New Rifle Ban,” the U.S. district court (N.D. Ill.) denied a motion for preliminary injunction against the State’s ban on semiautomatic rifles and standard-capacity magazines, greatly departing from  Supreme Court precedent on the Second Amendment.

While that denial was being appealed to the 7th Circuit, Judge Stephen McGlynn (S.D. Ill.) found that plaintiffs in another challenge were likely to succeed on the merits that the law violates the Second Amendment, and he issued a preliminary injunction against enforcement.  See my post. The 7th Circuit immediately granted the State’s motion for a stay against the injunction in a one-sentence order without giving the plaintiffs an opportunity to respond.

So now the challengers have filed amicus briefs supporting NAGR in the Supreme Court, and we await a decision there.

While granting the emergency application in an interlocutory appeal of this type would be unusual, there are compelling reasons to do so here, as perhaps explained best in the amicus brief filed by Paul Clement and Erin Murphy on behalf of the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF).  As they note, there were only six states with bans last year when New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen was decided, and now there are ten.  “Instead of treating Bruen as an occasion to reconsider existing restrictions on constitutional rights of law-abiding citizens, they have enacted new ‘assault weapon’ and/or ‘large-capacity magazine’ bans, with more still on the way.”  Quoting phrases from Bruen, they argue:

Rifles, pistols, and shotguns plainly “constitute bearable arms”—i.e., “instruments that facilitate armed self-defense,” …—no matter what kind of grip, stock, ammunition feeding device, or other features they may have. The right to keep and bear them is thus “presumptively protect[ed]” by the Constitution.  In breezily concluding that the firearms Illinois has banned are not even “Arms” covered by the plain text of the Second Amendment, the district court in this case inexplicably ignored the test that Bruen articulated, and instead simply declared that “[t]he text of the Second Amendment is limited to only certain arms.”

The particulars of the Illinois case and some further history are at the link.