The Chicago suburb of Deerfield, Illinois, passed a surrender and confiscation ordinance for “assault weapons” Monday night and the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) responded by filing suit on Thursday.
Breitbart News reported that that ordinance is designed to give Deerfield residents 60 days to get rid of any “assault weapons” and “high capacity” magazines. This includes being sure no such weapons or magazines are in residents’ homes. The ordinance empowers the police chief to confiscate and destroy any “assault weapons” and “high capacity” magazines which residents’ hold to after 60 days.
This builds on a 2013 Deerfield ordinance that banned “assault weapons” but allowed possession of them in one’s home if stored properly.
SAF filed suit against the new ordinance, claiming it violates Illinois’ preemption law. SAF founder and executive vice president Alan Gottlieb said, “We moved swiftly to challenge this gun ban because it flies in the face of state law. While the village is trying to disguise this as an amendment to an existing ordinance, it is, in fact, a new law that entirely bans possession of legally-owned semi-auto firearms, with no exception for guns previously owned, or any provision for self-defense.”
Moreover, Gottlieb noted that the confiscatory nature of the new ordinance, combined with the mandate that all “assault weapons” be moved outside the village or destroyed, “puts the lie to claims by anti-gunners that ‘nobody is coming to take your guns.’”
SAF’s suit is joined by the Illinois State Rifle Association and Daniel Easterday, a private citizen who lives in the village and is a gun owner
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News, the host of the Breitbart podcast Bullets with AWR Hawkins, and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com. Sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange.