We will never forget the 2022 Highland Park mass shooting that killed seven, wounded dozens more and resulted in the saddest July Fourth in the history of Illinois.
“Do we have to live like this?” we wrote the following day, just as Highland Park was beginning to mourn its dead and tend to its wounded, “that’s really the only salient question. Do we?”
Our answer to that question, then and now, is “no, we don’t.”
That means we must rid ourselves of assault weapons, the tool of choice for disillusioned, nihilistic killers who hope to kill scores of innocent people at once, as was the case at the Highland Park parade, but that no one needs for sporting purposes or for self-defense.
So we were glad to read federal Appellate Judge Amy St. Eve, a President Donald Trump appointee, write as follows in the court’s righteous upholding of the Illinois assault weapons ban: “Whatever else may be contributing to America’s mass-shooting epidemic, the record makes one thing clear: The more people killed, the more likely it is that the killer used an assault weapon and large-capacity magazines.”
Exactly. As the court said, the Illinois law is “consistent with our regulatory tradition” and does not violate the Second Amendment right to bear arms. These weapons and magazines exist to promote the death of innocents. They are killing machines. They have no place in our state.
We’ve said this many times.
In 2024, for example, we lamented that the Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling invalidating the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ rule banning so-called bump stocks (a heinous device that allows a killer to fire off 400 to 800 rounds in a minute) would be unthinkable in other nations, and noted that the rule was put in place during Trump’s first term. The court held that the rule was imprecise and Justice Samuel Alito urged the legislative branch to amend the law instead.
Well, Illinois has such a law, dubbed the Protect Illinois Communities Act, passed and quickly signed by Gov. JB Pritzker in January 2023. It prohibits the sale of more than 100 kinds of semiautomatic firearms and, crucially, also limits magazine capacities. It is a very good law. Our state does not need these weapons. We find unpersuasive the dissent’s argument that a widespread civilian ownership of AR-15s, including their asserted use for self-defense, places them beyond the state’s power to prohibit.
No doubt this one is headed to the Supreme Court. If so, we urge that court, not least in memory of the dead of Highland Park, to uphold the wisdom of the 7th Circuit’s decision.
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