Another Victim in Chicago’s ‘Gun-Free’ Transit System As SCOTUS Appears Poised to Reject Lawsuit

We’ve been covering the Schoenthal v. Raoul case for several years here at Bearing Arms, but it looks like the case challenging the carry ban on Illinois public transit may soon come to an unsatisfying conclusion. 

Last week SCOTUS pulled the case from consideration in its Friday conference, which would have been the first time the case was discussed at the High Court. The move led some court watchers to conclude that the justices were planning on granting cert but remanding the case to lower courts after the Supreme Court’s decision in Wolford v. Lopez is released later this year. 

On Monday, however, the justices listed the case for this week’s conference, which suggests that the reason the case was pulled was to give one or more justices a chance to write a dissent regarding the denial of cert. It’s possible that isn’t what’s going on, and I hope that I’m wrong, because the inability to lawfully possess a firearm on public transit is putting our 2A rights and the public at risk. 

A 30-year-old man was stabbed at the Western Blue Line station in Bucktown early Saturday morning after an argument turned into a physical attack, police said.

Officers responded to the station at 1909 North Western Avenue around 12:20 a.m. after the victim got into an argument with an unknown man on the platform, CPD said. The offender pulled out a sharp object and stabbed the victim before fleeing the station on foot, according to police.

According to CWB Chicago, that was the fourth stabbing on CTA property since March 12. The website has also documented several robberies on CTA property in recent weeks, including one allegedly committed by a guy wearing an ankle monitor for robbing someone on a CTA train last year… when he was also wearing an ankle monitor. 

These incidents, along with other higher-profile crimes like the woman who was set on fire by a rider on a CTA train, are proof that the city’s public transit system simply isn’t safe. But according to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, the ban on concealed carry on CTA property is just fine because the Second Amendment doesn’t protect bearing arms in crowded public spaces. 

That faulty logic alone is reason enough for SCOTUS to accept Schoenthal v. Raoul. If the Court allows the Seventh Circuit decision to stand, it opens the door for anti-gun states to absolutely gut the right to bear arms in public settings. SCOTUS said in Bruen that crowded places generally protected by police are not, by definition, sensitive places where lawful carry can be prohibited, but that’s essentially what the Seventh Circuit has done. 

The appellate court couldn’t find any national tradition of laws that banned guns on trains, so instead they used private railroad rules as a historic analogue for the Illinois ban, which could lead to even more anti-2A mischief going forward. We’ve already seen some judges declare that the absence of a particular gun law in the past doesn’t mean that the modern law is unconstitutional, but what happens when courts don’t even have to look for laws as evidence of a national tradition? 

Editor’s Note: The radical left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.

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