Today was the date we’ve all been waiting for since back in late January when we filed the legal challenge to JB Pritzker’s gun and magazine ban. The hearing was initially planned to last about two hours. It ran closer to 3.5 hours and the state got an overwhelming majority of that time. Why? Well, the judge was skeptical about many (most?) of their arguments and asked them a lot of probative questions.
It surely looked like the judge read our pleadings carefully. It also appeared to observers that he looked over almost two thousand pages of filings on behalf of the defendants. In fact, he presented some slides from their filings and asked questions of the defendant’s attorney. Obviously Kwame’s lawyer wasn’t a gun guy. He was, in short, swimming in the deep water as a very novice swimmer.
The call-in number was a complete failure… but Todd Vandermyde and some others were there. Their hot take?
In speaking with Todd, he said we did pretty well. Things got bogged down in minutia here and there, and we didn’t get to hit some of the points we wanted to make. However, those things happen in oral arguments. That’s why you have written pleadings.
Now we sit and wait a week or two for the judge to evaluate the briefs and formulate his decision (and write it). Clearly Judge Stephen McGlynn will be spending some long nights working on this in the coming days. He’s going to earn his salary in writing this decision, which will likely be one of the biggest of his career in terms of its impact.
For those wanting more details, Greg Bishop (from talk radio and The Center Square) was also present in court and he tweeted the hearing live.
You can look over this tweets here, even if you don’t have a Twitter account.
I’d also keep an eye on The Center Square for a news report on Bishop’s take on the hearing. I’ll look these over tonight over a few fingers of Bulleit Bourbon. Todd says his computer is in the shop so he may not have a video tonight on his Freedom’s Steel YouTube channel until tomorrow.
In short, don’t panic. We did okay today. Okay and then some.
Kwame, on the other hand, has lots of reasons to be anxious over today’s hearing.
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