Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul has filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the U.S. Supreme Court defending the right of states and local governments to restrict AR-15-platform rifles, his office announced Wednesday.
The brief was filed as part of a coalition of attorneys general. It supports Cook County and the state of Connecticut as the Supreme Court prepares to decide whether the Second Amendment allows states and local jurisdictions to regulate the weapons, according to the attorney general's office.
The court will hear oral arguments in two consolidated cases, Viramontes v. Cook County and Grant v. Higgins, on Dec. 2, with an opinion expected before the current term ends in the summer of 2027. According to the Supreme Court's case page on SCOTUSblog, the consolidated cases ask whether the Second and 14th Amendments guarantee the right to possess AR-15-platform and similar semiautomatic rifles.
"We have seen the damage that assault weapons can inflict, and these weapons of war have no place in our communities," Raoul said. "States and local governments must be able to protect their residents by restricting access to assault weapons. I remain committed to promoting public safety by defending commonsense gun safety measures. My office has successfully defended the state's prohibition on these weapons in both state and federal court, and I stand by Cook County in its efforts to protect Illinois residents."
The brief argues that government regulations of assault weapons are consistent with the Second Amendment because governments have long regulated weapons that are unusually dangerous and pose a serious public safety threat, the attorney general's office said. It states that the legal tradition stretches back to the 1300s in England and continued through English common law and the nation's founding. The office said those restrictions include limits on semiautomatic assault weapons such as AR-15-platform rifles.
The office said assault weapons were designed for military combat to inflict as many injuries and deaths as possible as quickly as possible, and that those features make them the most commonly used weapons in mass shootings in the United States. The restrictions enacted by Cook County and Connecticut are intended to reduce such injuries and deaths, the office said.
Background on the laws
According to the attorney general's office, Cook County has regulated assault weapons since 1993 and strengthened its weapons ordinance with the Blair Holt Assault Weapons Ban in 2006, named after the 16-year-old son of a Chicago police officer and a Chicago firefighter who was killed aboard a city bus after school.
Connecticut updated its 1993 assault weapons ban months after the Dec. 12, 2012, Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, in which a gunman armed with an AR-15-style rifle killed 20 children and six educators in under five minutes, the office said.
The Viramontes case comes out of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which upheld Cook County's ban, and Grant out of the 2nd Circuit, which upheld Connecticut's law. Both lower courts affirmed the restrictions, according to the Supreme Court case record on SCOTUSblog.
Raoul was joined by the attorneys general of Arizona, California, Colorado, the District of Columbia, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington.