EAST ST. LOUIS – National group Everytown for Gun Safety moved on March 9 to file a brief as friend of U. S. district court in favor of Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s law regulating semi automatic weapons and "high capacity" magazines.
The group’s counsel Bhavani Raveendran attached the brief, in which she claims the Fourteenth Amendment amended the meaning of the Second Amendment.
Raveendran practices at the Romanucci and Blandin injury firm in Chicago.
Raveendran
| Romanucci Blandin Law
The firm and its leader Antonio Romanucci have contributed $1,574,601.54 to political campaigns, more than a third of it in the last three years.
Last year he and his firm delivered $105,000 for successful Supreme Court candidates Elizabeth Rochford and Mary O’Brien.
Rochford and O’Brien will participate in resolution of constitutional challenges in state courts.
Four challenges to the gun ban in federal court belong to District Judge Stephen McGlynn, who consolidated them last month.
According to Raveendran, Everytown for Gun Safety has nearly ten million supporters including more than 370,000 in Illinois.
She wrote that mayors and mothers formed the group in 2014 after a gunman murdered 20 children and six adults at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut.
She stated Everytown for Gun Safety has filed more than 60 amicus briefs, and courts have expressly relied on them.
She claimed the law is constitutional under the U. S. Supreme Court decision in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen.
Raveendran claimed plaintiffs have not met their burden to establish that guns within the scope of the law are protected within the meaning of the Second Amendment.
She claimed McGlynn should center his analysis on 1868, when the states ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, and not on 1791, when they ratified the Second Amendment.
“Moreover, 1868 is not a cutoff,” she wrote.
She claimed determination of public understanding after enactment or ratification is a critical tool of constitutional interpretation.
“As Bruen instructs, this is particularly so where, as here, the challenged ordinance implicates 'unprecedented societal concerns or dramatic technological changes,'” she wrote.
Raveendran claimed that under Bruen, a court must ask whether a regulation is consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.
She claimed Bruen’s analysis revealed that a small number of laws can establish the nation’s tradition of regulation, “at least so long as there is not overwhelming affirmative evidence of an enduring tradition to the contrary.”
She argued many courts have correctly read Bruen to place the burden on a plaintiff to establish that the Second Amendment’s plain text covers their conduct.
Raveendran claimed plaintiffs have failed to establish that assault weapons and large capacity magazines are among the arms that the Second Amendment protects.
She added that an earlier Supreme Court decision found the Second Amendment applies only to weapons in common use and typically possessed by law abiding citizens for lawful purposes.
She claimed the Eleventh Circuit recently explained that the Fourteenth Amendment caused the Second Amendment to apply to the States.
She claimed the understanding that prevailed when the states adopted the Fourteenth Amendment is what matters.
“There was no right to keep and bear arms constraining the states under the U.S. Constitution until 1868,” she wrote.
Raveendran claimed if modern technology or social concern that warrants regulation did not exist in the time period a court examines, there would be no historical laws addressing the development or concern to be found in that period.
“That is precisely the situation in this case,” she wrote.
“Illinois enacted the challenged law in response to the exponential increase in the lethality of firearms and magazines and 'unprecedented societal concern,'” she added.
Raveendran claimed widespread acceptance of a practice of carrying guns as a matter of policy does not indicate that the practice was constitutionally protected.
She claimed the absence of laws restricting firearms in other states does not warrant any inference that their citizens considered such restrictions unconstitutional.