The request was sent to Justice Amy Coney Barrett earlier this month after the Seventh Circuit upheld the ban in November.
The unsigned order read, “The application for a writ of injunction pending certiorari presented to Justice Barrett and by her referred to the Court is denied.” There was no explanation or reasoning presented and no dissents.
This action was another example of the recent pattern of the high court denying emergency relief in Second Amendment cases.
The justices left the law intact pending the NAGR appeal. The owner of Naperville’s Law Weapons & Supply, Robert Bevis, led the vigorous challenge to the anti-Second Amendment action.
Bevis, NAGR and other plaintiffs requested an en banc hearing before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit as well as an injunction against enforcing the state’s Protect Illinois Communities Act.
Justice Barrett ordered a briefing, but that’s as far as the emergency request advanced.
Expectations were high for this Supreme Court concerning gun rights after last year’s landmark Bruen decision, and they may still be met. But justices have been utterly unwilling to step into Second Amendment cases being adjudicated by lower courts.
Perhaps it is a strict adherence to the process, the traditional approach of allowing the case to wind its way through the appeals courts before possibly landing at their footsteps.
And justices will unquestionably see these issues again. There are too many pivotal legal challenges to laws restricting gun rights for the high court to not be presented with the opportunity for a final ruling. As for now, that is what gun rights advocates must pin their hopes upon.
