After the terrifying mass shooting at Highland Park’s Fourth of July parade, many noted the irony that the incident occurred in one of the few cities in Illinois where assault weapons are banned by local law, but few have noted that today, no other Illinois community can put such an ordinance on the books, barred from doing so by a…
After the terrifying mass shooting at Highland Park's Fourth of July parade, many noted the irony that the incident occurred in one of the few cities in Illinois where assault weapons are banned by local law.
But few have noted that today, no other Illinois community can put such an ordinance on the books, barred from doing so by a bizarre act of the Illinois General Assembly in May of 2013, which briefly allowed towns like Highland Park to act.
It all happened in the aftermath of the massacre at the Sandy Hook elementary school in December 2012, and a failed effort to enact an assault weapons ban here in Illinois.
"I was very disappointed," former Gov. Pat Quinn said of those days more than nine years ago. "Some of the Democrats who I thought would vote yes on the legislation all of a sudden were saying, 'People in my district aren’t for it.'"
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Quinn said he was astounded that the proposed statewide ban fell two votes short, despite the presence of Sandy Hook families he had taken to the Capitol to tell their personal stories.
"I was the governor of Illinois and I pleaded with them - this is not political, this is saving lives," he said. "Frankly the leaders, Mike Madigan in the House and John Cullerton in the Senate, really didn’t push hard for this at all."
During that session, then-Sen. Kwame Raoul, now the Illinois Attorney General, was the point-person on a separate gun bill. That was concealed carry legislation, which had been mandated by the federal court.
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"You know, that’s opportunistic finger-pointing," Raoul said in response to Quinn’s criticisms, insisting that the support for including a statewide assault weapons ban in the concealed carry bill just simply wasn’t there.
"That governor had years before to do what he did, in that short window of time as governor," he said.
Raoul said in the absence of political support for a statewide ban, he felt it was important to concentrate his energy on putting the safest possible concealed carry legislation on the books by the court-mandated deadline, or the consequences would have been dire.
"A state that has its concealed carry ban just wiped out - what the state of things would be would be open carry," he said. "There would be no restrictions whatsoever."
During those concealed carry negotiations, the gun lobby wanted to prevent individual towns across Illinois from passing any local laws regulating firearms, preempting home rule. But an unusual compromise was reached, which did allow local communities to put their own gun laws on the books, but only if they did so within ten days of the effective date of the bill. And that tiny window is when Highland Park and a dozen other communities passed their bans.
"At the end of the day," Raoul said, "the preferable way to do it is to have a law statewide."
While most observers believe it's a tough legislative hill to climb, gun safety advocates say they plan a renewed push for such a ban statewide when the legislature reconvenes in 2023. But in the absence of any such ban, some Highland Park victims are taking a different route, suing the accused gunman, his father, the gun manufacturer and the store that sold the weapon used in the Fourth of July attack.
"It’s offensive, it’s obnoxious, it’s hard to put into words what the shooting has done to this city," said Ari Scharg, one of the attorneys who filed the lawsuit in Lake County court. Scharg was in the crowd at the Highland Park Fourth of July parade, giving him a unique perspective on that litigation, which he said he believes can accomplish change in the absence of legislative action.
"The only way to hold gun manufacturers accountable is to go after them and make them pay money for what they've done," he said.
"The lawsuit is not an attack on the gun industry," Scharg said. "But it is an attack on gun manufacturers who are advertising their firearms in a very specific way, and that is targeting young adolescent males with first-person-shooter-type advertisements that hearken back to first person shooter games like Call of Duty.”
Shooting survivor Liz Turnipseed is the plaintiff in Scharg’s suit. Having lived through the assault, she said she feels a responsibility to speak out.
"Because I’m here, and I can do it, and in some ways, I think if it was up to the shooter, I wouldn’t be,” she said. "He didn’t want me to survive - he wanted us all dead."
