BELLEVUE, WA – What appears to have been a brazen effort by the State of Illinois to go “judge buy-off” to transfer various federal lawsuits challenging new state law banning so-called “assault weapons” and their magazines has failed. , the Second Amendment Foundation said today.
“Our lawsuit and others have actually been transferred to a very impartial judge,” said SAF Founder and Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb. “We anticipated that the cases would eventually be consolidated, but instead of ending up with a judge that the state expected would be unfavorable to Second Amendment issues, I believe we now have an impartial judge.”
All cases have been assigned to the Federal District Court for the Southern District of Illinois. The SAF case, brought before the Illinois State Rifle Association and Firearms Policy Coalition, is known as Harrell vs. Raoul.
“This effort is likely to come back to haunt Illinois Governor JB Pritzker and Attorney General Kwame Raoul,” Gottlieb said. “The governor made a show of signing an extremist gun ban law, and we immediately challenged it in federal court. The attorney general finds himself in the uncomfortable position of having to uphold the law, and he is also a defendant in the case. His judge selection efforts have failed.”
Gottlieb said last summer’s Supreme Court ruling in Bruen is making it harder for gun prohibitionists to justify laws that have been penalizing honest citizens for decades, and new gun control schemes designed to further reduce Second Amendment rights.
“Illinois has to find a way to justify the Pritzker gun ban, and the state can’t do that because it’s not consistent with historical tradition going back to when the Constitution was ratified,” Gottlieb said. “Pritzker and others like him believe that the Second Amendment is a privilege, not a right. In reality, they think the Second Amendment is a loophole, and they’re determined to seal it because citizen disarmament is really what this is all about.
“We are confident that the court will instead shut them down,” he concluded.
The Second Amendment Foundation (www.saf.org) is the nation’s oldest and largest tax-exempt legal action, research, publishing, and education group focusing on the constitutional right and inheritance to own and own guns. fire privately. Founded in 1974, the Foundation has grown to more than 720,000 members and supporters and runs many programs designed to better inform the public about the consequences of gun control.