U.S. District Judge Virginia Kendall does a really good job playing the female version of Sgt. Schultz. “I know nothing! I see nothing!” And upon reading her decision carefully, it’s clear she’s trying to overturn the Bruen decision from last summer.
The slow-witted federal jurist is about to feel the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals’ clue-bat. It isn’t her place to overturn SCOTUS decisions, particularly 6-3 decisions.
Yes, she ruled that the new Illinois Firearms Ban Act is legal and “consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”
But more troubling, she tries to essentially twist herself into a pretzel starting on page 13 with how the Bruen decision doesn’t mean what it says or say what it means. Instead, she writes:
The text of the Second Amendment is limited to only certain arms, and history and tradition demonstrate that particularly “dangerous” weapons are unprotected.
Sorry, sweetheart. That flies in the face of countless court decisions.
And she tries to use laws in the Colonial period against carrying of clubs as justification for gun bans today.
We predict an epic slapdown of Judge Kendell’s unsound ruling, which relies on the 2-step balancing test that was struck down under the Bruen decision.
Yes, there are good judges and there are bad judges. And then there are judges who just don’t bother to read caselaw. But it makes for great headlines for desperate media outlets who need to sell newspapers and attract clicks and viewers.
Kendall wrote:
“Because assault weapons are particularly dangerous weapons and high-capacity magazines are particularly dangerous weapon accessories, their regulation accords with history and tradition.”
Sorry Virginia. It doesn’t matter how dangerous the weapons are. SCOTUS has already covered that… and I might add, remanded bad cases back to lower courts who continue to apply the two-step balancing test which is dead letter “law” now.
Lil’ Ginny drink the magical Kool-Aid that the second-rate attorney from Perkins Coie offered.
Her written opinion borders on unhinged and rightfully calls into question her judicial temperament to serve.
From the Sun-Times:
A federal judge in Chicago has denied a motion seeking a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction against Illinois’ assault weapons ban and a similar ordinance in Naperville.
U.S. District Judge Virginia Kendall ruled Friday that both Illinois and Naperville’s bans on selling assault weapons are “constitutionally sound.”
Lawyers for the National Association for Gun Rights and Robert Bevis, who owns a gun store in Naperville, sought the temporary restraining order and injunction as a part of their lawsuit trying to stop the bans.
They argued it is “impossible” for the new state gun law and a similar Naperville ordinance to meet the burden under the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, which was decided last summer.
In that case, the Supreme Court ruled governments must show that gun regulations are “consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”
“Because assault weapons are particularly dangerous weapons and high-capacity magazines are particularly dangerous weapon accessories, their regulation accords with history and tradition,” Kendall wrote in her ruling.
“Naperville and Illinois lawfully exercised their authority to control their possession, transfer, sale, and manufacture by enacting a ban on commercial sales,” the judge wrote.
While the lawsuit is one of a number of challenges facing Illinois’ ban, Kendall’s decision appears to be the first from a federal judge considering whether the ban comports with the Bruen decision.
She didn’t stop there…
“The text of the Second Amendment is limited to only certain arms, and history and tradition demonstrate that particularly ‘dangerous’ weapons are unprotected,” Kendall wrote.
Well, sometimes you can’t fix stupid. But you can make it hurt with humiliation when you strike down their garbage opinions and tell them to try again using the procedures set out by Bruen.
Here’s her ruling.
With her logic the First Amendment only applies to quill pens. So anything written with a BIC pen today wouldn’t apply because it has a nearly indestructible point and an endless supply of ink. Also any communication coming across by airwaves or cyberspace, radio, television, computers, phones, on and on would not apply because the didn’t exist in the 17 hundreds.
Progressive’s (Socialist) try to twist the narrative of the Bill Of Rights into anything that advances their agenda.
Just finished reading the ‘ruling’. I don’t think she missed a single factoid, statistic or argument that I hadn’t already heard from Brady or Everytown for Gun Banning. In fact, I suspect they probably wrote her response before she ever heard the case.
Her interpretation of Bruen was…perverse at best. She constantly, right to the very end, attempts to use the public safety test, which Bruen effectively destroyed. Her logic is not only inconsistent with current law as defined by SCOTUS, she attempted to rewrite the words of Heller, McDonald and Bruen to justify her opinion.
No matter. When the Seventh applies the Bruen ruling to this word salad ruling, it will be reversed. This robed clown might have been appointed by GWB, but she has all the qualifications to be a Potato Joe appointee, including thinking that the Bill of Rights somehow limits the rights of the individual. The makeup of the Seventh is far more favorable to us than this circuit court filled with Chicago leftists who ignore the law to justify a social agenda.
Her decision will be reversed even if it has to go to an En Banc!
Jim Sodo Gardner
Judge Whatzername is about to get famous in the gun community as a ideologue. Cancer is right… her decision is a pathetic word salad.
To ALL those Interested ……..
This notion that Repeating firearms or Large Capacity firearms did not exist before our present day, is False!
Before the Revolutionary and Civil War periods, many different types of Repeating firearms were made, Many gun owners have heard of the Puckle the firearm was tested in 1717 and Patented in 1718 , a repeating firearm. During an exhibition In the 1720’s Puckle once fired 63 Rounds in series from his firearm. While the Puckle was not a commercial success; it still existed.
In 1792 the U.S. Congress declined the purchase of the Chambers Repeating Multi-Barreled Firearm. The Chambers Firearm, had 7 barrels that had a Load Capacity of 32 Rounds per barrel. YES, 32 rounds per barrel for a TOTAL of 224 rounds per gun.
When the War of 1812 began the U.S. Navy made several purchases of the Chambers Multiple Barreled Firearm. The U.S. Navy used these Arms to defend the Great Lake region against the British.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lelAI_AwO-c
There are example of repeating firearms that go back to the 1500’s. There are Examples from the 1600’s of The “Repeating Matchlock Toradar” from India,
P.S> I keep hearing about bans on Bowie knives in the 1830’s as part of the argument against gun ownership.
PLEASE remember, this was after, the 1828 Turner Rebellion. Those Laws were put in Place to Disarm Blacks both Free and Slave.
GUN CONTROL HAS ITS ROOTS IN RACISM; especially after the 1828 Turner rebellion !!!!!!
Excellent points, Israel. Thanks for posting this.
How is the least powerful popular rifle cartridge, the .223/5.56 more dangerous than all other rifle cartridges? The magazine argument carries no water either. The Uvalde shooter have 77 minutes to murder those kids. He could have strangled them in that amount of time. The murderer in Idaho used a knife to quietly murder four adults. And rifles and shotguns of all kinds are used to murder less than 400 people a year. How is that more dangerous than hands and feet which are used more often to murder? The judge’s decision is driven by her emotionally based disgust with law abiding gun owners and their rifles. Do some research next time, Judge.
Notice what has happened in the media over the past year or so. Every story about guns has now shifted to wailing about ‘mass shootings’. We had 600 mass shootings in 2022, cries CNN and others. How ironic that the vast number of these shootings are gang-bangers shooting one another in deep blue cities across America, when up to a year ago no one gave a damn about that particular form of violence. Since nothing else has worked, now the propagandists have decided to use inner city violence to their advantage, to disarm law-abiding citizens.
An article this morning complains about the confusion wrought by SCOTUS over the Bruen decision. There is no confusion. What there are is activist judges like this putz who have an agenda. SCOTUS was absolutely clear about the public safety test no longer being valid where 2A rights are concerned, and yet this dimwit and others continue to try and apply it. This one even went so far as to bend herself into a pretzel to satisfy a ‘historical tradition’ using laws passed by the King of England before the Revolution against the colonists.
Our only choice is to stay on the offensive and destroy all forms of gun control in the US that uses public safety as their basis. The left will never stop trying to disarm the public, so we must never stop attacking them. We cannot continue to simply play defense all the time and let dimwits like this judge legislate from the bench.
Folks go watch Todd Vandermeid’s video about this decision. It’s at Freedom Steel on YouTube. This judge was also overturned in both of Rhonda Ezell’s cases. This woman hates guns.
Activist judges come in all stripes, not just ones appointed by Democrats. She’s a gun-hater, and is apparently incapable of doing the one job she was hired to do – interpret the constitutionality of a given law. Activist clowns like her are a stain on the judicial system. We knew eventually we would encounter one of these losers, and it’s no surprise it came in Chicago’s backyard which is filled with these do-gooder pieces of trash that feel, rather than think.
I am very confident she will be overturned again, and we can continue to move forward. In the grand scheme of things her ruling is quite limited in scope, and doesn’t affect the rest of our efforts in any way.
If you want to see what nonsense this judge tried to pull in the Ezell Decision, read here:
https://www.saf.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/ezelldecision.pdf
She gets slapped down hard for her attempt to legislate from the bench in this case. Interestingly enough, she used many of the same arguments she got torched over in this case to deny the TRO. She clearly has an anti-gun agenda and employs pretzel logic to justify her nonsense.
Remember that this case was decided using Heller and McDonald, and is pre-Bruen, which means the public safety balancing test had not yet been shot down by SCOTUS. Nevertheless, it gives great insight into the direction of the courts. Expect Judge Dimwit to be the subject of another epic beatdown by the Appellate.