A Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals judge has stayed the preliminary injunction issued a week ago by a lower court. That restores the Land of Lincoln’s new gun and magazine ban.  Judge Stephen McGlynn from the Southern District of Illinois had previously ruled that plaintiff would likely prevail against the ban and blocked enforcement of the ban, restoring sales of the newly-banned items.

The state appealed the decision within hours and when McGlynn didn’t immediately reverse himself, Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul appealed to the Seventh Circuit.

It all made more sense when we found out the judge who issued the stay which restored the gun ban was Judge Frank Easterbrook. Before his appointment to the appellate court, Easterbrook served as a federal district judge. He wrote the Friedman decision, upholding the state’s ban on the AR-15 and many other semi-automatic firearms. Easterbrook’s Friedman decision relied on the two-step, interest-balancing test that was later explicitly repudiated by the Supreme Court in its Bruen decision.

From the Cook County Record . . .

…However, in the order, Easterbrook gave the plaintiffs until May 9 to file a response to the order.

He notably directed them to include in their response a discussion on “the bearing of” two prior decisions from the Seventh Circuit addressing the constitutionality of “assault weapons” bans. In those decisions, known as Friedman v Highland Park and Wilson v Cook County, the Seventh Circuit court upheld “assault weapons” bans in suburban Highland Park and in Cook County, finding the Second Amendment’s guarantee of the right for Americans to keep and bear arms did not prevent governments from banning entire categories of firearms in the name of public safety.

In the Friedman decision, particularly, the Seventh Circuit declared its belief the Second Amendment “does not imperil every law regulating firearms.” The court noted people living under such bans could still purchase other firearms for self-defense.

The state appeared to use those local bans as models for the so-called Protect Illinois Communities Act.

In other words, Judge Easterbrook ignored plain language of the Bruen decision, instead trying to defend his faulty Friedman ruling as black letter law when, in a post-Bruen world, it’s really dead-letter law.

Many believe this new stay of the injunction will influence Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s decision-making on the Naperville “assault weapons” ban case that’s due Monday.

Who knows? Judge Easterbrook’s stunt, issuing a stay based on a faulty ruling, might backfire on those wanting to validate past rulings on laws that banned some of the most popular and effective guns used for self-defense. It might provoke SCOTUS to weigh in on these gun bans sooner rather than later. Watch this space.