NRA Urges Supreme Court to Hear Challenge to Illinois Public Transit Carry Ban

The National Rifle Association—along with the Association of New Jersey Rifle & Pistol Clubs, Gun Owners’ Action League, New Jersey Firearms Owners Syndicate, and New York State Rifle & Pistol Association—has filed an amicus brief urging the U.S. Supreme Court to hear Schoenthal v. Raoul, a constitutional challenge to Illinois’s public transit carry ban.

Illinois’s law prohibits concealed carry licensees from carrying firearms on public transportation unless the firearms are unloaded and secured—effectively rendering them useless for lawful self-defense.

In September 2025, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the ban, concluding that “crowded spaces” qualify as “sensitive places” where the government may broadly prohibit the exercise of the right to bear arms. The plaintiffs subsequently petitioned the Supreme Court to review the decision.

Our brief urges the Supreme Court to grant review to clarify how courts should identify historical analogues under the Court’s text-and-history test for Second Amendment challenges. It explains that lower courts are increasingly upholding firearm regulations by analogizing at an excessively high level of abstraction, effectively reintroducing interest-balancing under the guise of historical analysis. The Seventh Circuit’s decision exemplifies this error by inventing a new “sensitive place” category—“crowded spaces”—to uphold Illinois’s ban, despite the absence of any representative historical tradition and the Supreme Court’s clear statement that a place may not be deemed sensitive “simply because it is crowded.”

Please stay tuned to www.nraila.org for future updates on NRA-ILA’s ongoing efforts to defend your constitutional rights, and please visit www.nraila.org/litigation to keep up to date on NRA-ILA’s ongoing litigation efforts.