Crime & Law

U.S. Supreme Court Agrees to Hear Challenge to Cook County’s Assault Weapons Ban

The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear a challenge to Cook County’s assault weapons ban.

The high court on Tuesday granted certiorari in the case brought by a pair of Cook County residents and gun rights activists who challenged the county’s existing law, which bars residents from owning, buying or transferring 125 types of rifles, such as the AR-15.

Cook County State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke defended the ban as a “lawful ordinance” and said her office will fight to keep it in place in order to “continue protecting the people of Cook County.”

“We will not back down from defending Cook County’s long-standing ban on assault weapons,” O’Neill Burke said in a statement Tuesday. “These weapons of war are designed to inflict the maximum amount of carnage and destruction and have no place in our communities. Countless victims have already endured the devastating impact of gun violence.”

Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday morning.

Cook County first adopted a local assault weapons ban in 1993, and it has been updated at least twice since then. It is now officially known as the Blair Holt Assault Weapons Ban, named after a Chicago teen who was killed in a 2007 shooting while protecting a high school classmate.

In 2018, a federal judge in Chicago upheld the law, citing a 7th Circuit decision from three years earlier upholding a nearly identical city ordinance in Highland Park. The case was appealed and in 2019, and the 7th Circuit reaffirmed its position that “bans on assault weapons and large-capacity magazines do not contravene the Second Amendment.”

The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal of that decision.

The current challenge was filed in 2021, when the two gun rights organizations went back to court seeking to have both the Highland Park and Cook County decisions reversed. The plaintiffs include two Cook County residents, Cutberto Viramontes and Christopher Khaya.

They argue that only firearms that are “both dangerous and unusual” may be banned.

“And an arm, like the AR-15, that is owned in large numbers by law-abiding people across the country and restricted only in a small minority of jurisdictions cannot possibly be ‘dangerous and unusual’ under binding precedent,” attorneys for the petitioners wrote last year.

County officials countered last fall that the “trauma assault weapon massacres have inflicted on the public at large has been staggering.”

“For over three decades, the democratically elected officials of respondent Cook County, Illinois, have been faced with the overwhelming, mounting, and unrefuted evidence showing that assault rifles are the weapon of choice for criminals and terrorists set on quickly massacring innocents, but are rarely put to lawful public use,” attorneys for Cook County wrote in an October 2025 brief. “They have thus determined that this warrants a prohibition on the possession of those weapons within the County’s target-rich and crowded
urban confines.”

The Supreme Court is also set to take up a similar case involving a ban on the AR-15 and similar firearms in Connecticut. Four conservative justices on the nine-member court, enough to grant review of a case, had signaled that it was only a matter of time before the court took up the issue.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.

Capitol News Illinois and the Associated Press contributed to this report.

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