The United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit has upheld Illinois’s ban on AR-15-style rifles and magazines holding more than ten rounds, reversing a permanent injunction that a federal trial judge issued after a full bench trial. The decision, Barnett v. Raoul, Nos. 24-3060 & 24-3063 (7th Cir. July 9, 2026), came down 2-1, with Judge Amy J. St. Eve writing for the majority, Judge Frank H. Easterbrook joining her, and Chief Judge Michael B. Brennan dissenting. I have read a great many flawed Second Amendment opinions since Bruen. This one contains an error so basic that if a lawyer submitted it to me in a brief, I would consider moving for sanctions.
What the Trial Court Found
The panel reversed U.S. District Judge Stephen P. McGlynn of the Southern District of Illinois, who held a full bench trial and issued a lengthy opinion concluding that the Protect Illinois Communities Act’s ban on semi-automatic rifles and standard-capacity magazines violates the Second Amendment. Judge McGlynn’s findings of fact ran well over a hundred pages. The majority did not need to disturb a single one of them to rule against the plaintiffs, because it decided the case on a different theory entirely: that Illinois’s ban falls outside District of Columbia v. Heller’s protection because AR-15s and mass shootings each represent something the founding generation never confronted.
The Sentence They Cut in Half
New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1 (2022), contains one sentence that has become the favorite tool of judges looking for a way around Heller. Here is the full sentence, exactly as the Supreme Court wrote it:
“While the historical analogies here and in Heller are relatively simple to draw, other cases implicating unprecedented societal concerns or dramatic technological changes may require a more nuanced approach.”
Read it carefully. The “more nuanced approach” applies to other cases — cases other than Heller and Bruen itself, meaning cases other than arms-ban cases. That limitation is not incidental to the sentence. It is the entire point of the sentence.
Now here is what the Seventh Circuit actually wrote in Barnett:
“Bruen’s recognition that ‘cases implicating unprecedented societal concerns or dramatic technological changes may require a more nuanced approach’ to its historical inquiry fortifies, but is not essential to, our conclusion… this case implicates both the grounds Bruen identified in an interdependent way. The dramatic technological change embodied in AR-15s equipped with large-capacity magazines has enabled the unprecedented societal concern of mass killings speedily carried out by lone shooters.”
The word “other” is gone. The clause confining that language to non-arms-ban cases has vanished. What remains reads as though the Supreme Court handed lower courts a free-floating license to relax Heller’s test whenever a judge decides a gun or a crime feels sufficiently modern. That is not what Bruen said, and the omission is not a minor drafting choice: it is the entire hook the majority needed to reach its result.
I made this exact argument in “What Part of ‘In Common Use’ Don’t You Understand?: How Courts Have Defied Heller in Arms-Ban Cases—Again,” Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, Per Curiam No. 41 (Fall 2023). That article was cited on page vii of the brief filed with the Seventh Circuit on behalf of the Second Amendment plaintiffs in this very case. The court had the argument in hand and did not grapple with it.
A “Dramatic Technological Change” the Court Already Blessed
The majority’s first premise is that semi-automatic rifle technology represents a dramatic change unknown to the founders. But Heller did not strike down the District of Columbia’s handgun ban in 2008 because handguns were old technology. It struck down that ban because semi-automatic handguns are arms in common use for lawful purposes — the same self-loading operating mechanism found in an AR-15. Justice Brett Kavanaugh has already made both halves of this point from the bench. In the birthright-citizenship case, Trump v. Barbara, he wrote that constitutional principles “must be faithfully applied” not only to the circumstances of the founding “but also to modern situations that were unknown or unanticipated by the Constitution’s Framers.” And in his statement respecting the denial of certiorari in Snope v. Brown, 605 U.S. ___ (2025), he observed that AR-15s are semi-automatic — and so are most handguns, the very arms Heller protects. As I read those opinions together, that is the same technology, the same lineage, that the Barnett majority calls unprecedented.
An “Unprecedented” Concern That Predates Heller
The panel’s second premise fares no better. Mass shootings committed with semi-automatic firearms are not a post-2008 phenomenon. The Virginia Tech massacre of April 2007 — thirty-two people killed with two semi-automatic pistols — hung over the entire Heller litigation, which was briefed, argued, and decided in the following fourteen months. A concern the Supreme Court already had before it when it decided Heller cannot, by definition, be unprecedented in 2026.
Why This Case Is Not the Last Word
The Supreme Court granted certiorari on June 30, 2026, in Viramontes v. Cook County and Grant v. Higgins, consolidated to decide whether the Second Amendment protects AR-15-platform rifles — the first time the Court has agreed to confront an assault-weapons ban directly. When a lower court builds its holding on half a sentence, the missing half tends to resurface. I expect it will.
This article is based on analysis by Professor Mark W. Smith, constitutional attorney and Host of the Four Boxes Diner 2nd Amendment channel. Watch the original video here. This does not constitute legal advice.