We win, but “Nevertheless we order our mandate
stayed for 180 days to allow the Illinois
legislature to craft a new gun law that will
impose reasonable limitations, consistent with the public
safety and the Second Amendment as interpreted in
this opinion, on the carrying of guns in public.
REVERSED AND REMANDED, WITH DIRECTIONS”

More to come after we digest the decision.

Link to decision here!

UPDATE:

My interpretation in a nutshell:

Illinois prohibition on right to carry has been struck down.

The court has given the Illinois government 180 days to come up with a legislative change (a right-to-carry bill, approved into law) that meets with its approval.

The court is okay with some restrictions…  including a training requirement, a demonstration of competency with the handgun, prohibited or restricted locations and similar.

Failure to do so will result in the Illinois FOID card becoming a de facto carry license.

-John Boch

I am not a lawyer, and I didn’t stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.

Here are the highlights (excerpts):

 

The Supreme Court rejected the argument. The appellees ask us to repudiate the Court’s historical analysis. That we can’t do. Nor can we ignore the implication of the analysis that the constitutional right of armed selfdefense is broader than the right to have a gun in one’s home.

 

Both Heller and McDonald do say that “the need for defense of self, family, and property is most acute” in the home, id. at 3036 (emphasis added); 554 U.S. at 628, but that doesn’t mean it is not acute outside the home.

 

Both Heller and McDonald do say that “the need for defense of self, family, and property is most acute” in the home, id. at 3036 (emphasis added); 554 U.S. at 628, but that doesn’t mean it is not acute outside the home. Heller repeatedly invokes a broader Second Amendment right than the right to have a gun in one’s home, as when it says that the amendment “guarantee[s] the individual right to possess and carry weapons in case of confrontation.” 554 U.S. at 592. Confrontations are not limited to the home.

 

The Second Amendment states in its entirety that “a well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed” (emphasis added). The right to “bear” as distinct from the right to “keep” arms is unlikely to refer to the home. To speak of “bearing” arms within one’s home would at all times have been an awkward usage. A right to bear arms thus implies a right to carry a loaded gun outside the home.

 

Twenty-first century Illinois has no hostile Indians. But a Chicagoan is a good deal more likely to be attacked on a sidewalk in a rough neighborhood than in his apartment on the 35th floor of the Park Tower. A woman who is being stalked or has obtained a protective order against a violent ex-husband is more vulnerable to being attacked while walking to or from her home than when inside. She has a stronger self-defense claim to be allowed to carry a gun in public than the resident of a fancy apartment building (complete with doorman) has a claim to sleep with a loaded gun under her mattress.

 

To confine the right to be armed to the home is to divorce the Second Amendment from the right of self-defense described in Heller and McDonald. It is not a property right—a right to kill a houseguest who in a fit of aesthetic fury tries to slash your copy of Norman Rockwell’s painting Santa with Elves. That is not self-defense, and this case like Heller and McDonald is just about self-defense.

 

[T]he Supreme Court made clear in Heller that it wasn’t going to make the right to bear arms depend on casualty counts.

Remarkably, Illinois is the only state that maintains a flat ban on carrying ready-to-use guns outside the home, though many states used to ban carrying concealed guns outside the home, Bishop, supra, at 910; David B. Kopel, “The Second Amendment in the Nineteenth Century,” 1998 BYU L. Rev. 1359, 1432–33 (1998)—a more limited prohibition than Illinois’s, however. Not even Massachusetts has so flat a ban as Illinois, though the District of Columbia does, see D.C. Code §§ 22-4504 to -4504.02, and a few states did during the nineteenth century, Kachalsky v. County of Westchester, Nos. 11-3642, -3962, 2012 WL 5907502, at *6 (2d Cir. Nov. 27, 2012)—but no longer.

 

It is not that all states but Illinois are indifferent to the dangers that widespread public carrying of guns may pose. Some may be. But others have decided that a proper balance between the interest in self-defense and the dangers created by carrying guns in public is to limit the right to carry a gun to responsible persons rather than to ban public carriage altogether, as Illinois with its meager exceptions comes close to doing. Even jurisdictions like New York State, where officials have broad discretion to deny applications for gun permits, recognize that the interest in self-defense extends outside the home. There is no suggestion that some unique characteristic of criminal activity in Illinois justifies the state’s taking a different approach from the other 49 states. If the Illinois approach were demonstrably superior, one would expect at least one or two other states to have emulated it.

 

The Supreme Court has decided that the amendment confers a right to bear arms for self-defense, which is as important outside the home as inside. The theoretical and empirical evidence (which overall is inconclusive) is consistent with concluding that a right to carry firearms in public may promote self-defense. Illinois had to provide us with more than merely a rational basis for believing that its uniquely sweeping ban is justified by an increase in public safety. It has failed to meet this burden. The Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Second Amendment therefore compels us to reverse the decisions in the two cases before us and remand them to their respective district courts for the entry of declarations of unconstitutionality and permanent injunctions. Nevertheless we order our mandate stayed for 180 days to allow the Illinois legislature to craft a new gun law that will impose reasonable limitations, consistent with the public safety and the Second Amendment as interpreted in this opinion, on the carrying of guns in public.

 

REVERSED AND REMANDED, WITH DIRECTIONS; BUT MANDATE STAYED FOR 180 DAYS.