On October 28, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit heard argument in Chicago in Anderson v. Raoul, No. 25-2642, consolidated with No. 25-2663, the challenge to Illinois’s ban on firearm suppressors. The background of the case is set out in my earlier analysis. This piece concerns the argument itself, and my view is that the result is favorable to gun owners whichever way the panel rules.
The Panel and the Question
The Seventh Circuit’s argument calendar lists the panel as Judges Candace Jackson-Akiwumi, John Z. Lee, and Doris L. Pryor, all three of them elevated to the circuit bench by President Biden. I mention the point because the Seventh Circuit has a record in Second Amendment cases that gives advocates reason for caution, and Courthouse News described the bench as skeptical of our side. Skepticism at argument is not a ruling. The question for the panel is whether it will follow the Supreme Court’s methodology, which begins with the plain text and places the burden on the government at the second step.
The appeal comes from the Southern District of Illinois, where Judge David W. Dugan held that suppressors are not arms. Counsel for the appellants, Peter Patterson, relied on the Supreme Court’s decision this June in Wolford v. Lopez, No. 24-1046, which struck down Hawaii’s default rule barring licensed carriers from private property open to the public without the owner’s consent.
Wolford’s Three Questions
Wolford restates the plain-text inquiry as three questions: whether the law applies to the people, whether it concerns an arm, and whether it restricts the keeping or bearing of arms. The first is not in dispute. On the third, a ban that forbids a citizen to attach a suppressor to a lawfully owned firearm plainly restricts arms-bearing conduct. The contest is the second question.
Illinois, as I understand its position, says a suppressor is not an arm and that protecting every item attachable to a firearm would prove too much. The American Suppressor Association’s account of the argument reports the same theory. The theory fails on its own premise. Illinois does not regulate suppressors because it fears a metal tube. It regulates them because of what they do when mounted on a firearm, and a firearm is an arm. A law aimed at the operation of an arm concerns an arm.
That is the point Mr. Patterson pressed. Judge Pryor, according to Courthouse News, asked whether a firearm and its suppressor should be treated as separate instruments or as one weapon. The right answer is the one counsel gave, that a suppressor has no purpose apart from the firearm it serves. Treated together, they are one arm, and the question of whether the tube is an arm standing alone falls away.
Facilitating Self-Defense and “Necessary”
New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1 (2022), describes the protected category as modern instruments that facilitate armed self-defense. A suppressor does so in two ways. It protects hearing during training, and the Seventh Circuit itself recognized a right to train in Ezell v. City of Chicago, 651 F.3d 684 (7th Cir. 2011). It also protects the hearing of a defender and those around him if a shot must be fired indoors.
Illinois answers that a suppressor is not necessary to a firearm’s function. The word “necessary” has a settled meaning in constitutional law. Under the Necessary and Proper Clause, Article I, Section 8, the Supreme Court has read it since McCulloch v. Maryland, 17 U.S. 316 (1819), to mean useful and conducive to an end, not indispensable. If a suppressor is helpful to the effective and safe use of a firearm, it facilitates self-defense, and that is the test.
Why the Outcome Favors Gun Owners
If the panel holds that suppressors are arms, or even that they come within the plain text and remands for the history, the burden shifts to Illinois to show a tradition of banning a category of arms in common use. Under District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008), it cannot. Suppressors are lawful in more than forty states and owned by millions. In Caetano v. Massachusetts, 577 U.S. 411 (2016), Justice Alito, concurring in the judgment, noted that “[h]undreds of thousands of Tasers and stun guns have been sold to private citizens,” who may lawfully possess them in 45 states. The same two measures, ownership and legality across the states, favor suppressors by a wide margin.
If the panel rules against us, the Seventh Circuit will stand opposite the Fifth, which held in United States v. Comeaux, No. 24-30307 (5th Cir. June 18, 2026), that suppressors fall within the Second Amendment’s plain text. The Ninth Circuit had already taken the contrary view in United States v. DeBorba, No. 24-3304 (9th Cir. June 3, 2026), so a ruling for Illinois would add a second circuit to that side and sharpen a conflict the Supreme Court is likely to resolve.
These are forecasts, and I mark them as such. My view is that the sequence should be the AR-15 cases first, then suppressors, and then magazines. I do not control the docket. Whatever the panel does, Anderson has moved the question closer to review.
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.