By Phil Rogers – NBC Chicago
Just months after the deadly mass shooting at Highland Park’s Fourth of July parade, a survivor is sharing her story as the city’s assault weapons ban – which previously survived a challenge all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court – faces yet another legal battle.
For Liz Turnipseed, life forever changed on the Fourth of July.
“We heard a pop-pop-pop-pop-pop and I looked across the street – at first I thought it was firecrackers,” Turnipseed recalled. “And then all of a sudden, I was hit by what felt like a sonic boom to my body and I was thrown to the ground.”
Turnipseed was hit in the same flurry of gunfire where seven people died and 48 others were wounded. Lying on the ground, she said she turned and saw her 3-year-old daughter’s stroller on its side as bullets whizzed around her.
“Part of what I remember thinking is, we need to keep my daughter safe, and if I’m hit, that means my husband has to get her out of here, because we can’t leave my daughter without a parent,” Turnipseed said. “One of us has to live.”
It was a terrifying episode in what should have been a happy, peaceful day – in a town which, ironically, is one of only a handful of communities across Illinois that have implemented bans or any kind of local controls on assault weapons.
“The city council wanted to take the most action that it could. And that was a complete ban,” said city attorney Steve Elrod, who was instrumental in the passage of Highland Park’s assault weapons ban in 2013, and was in that frightened crowd on the Fourth of July.
He noted the ordinance withstood a challenge which went all the way up to the Supreme Court seven years ago. But he got some shocking news about a new challenge just a few weeks after the tragedy.
“It was a surprise to open my email and see that a lawsuit had been filed against Highland Park,” Elrod said.
Just eight weeks after the devastating assault on Highland Park, the city was targeted again by an organization called the National Association for Gun Rights, which is making a new effort to overturn the community’s assault weapons ban in federal court.
“The people who are going to commit these crimes don’t care what the law says and they don’t care what a sign says,” said Dudley Brown, the president of the Colorado-based NAGR, which is challenging Highland Park’s ordinance.
Brown would not address questions about timing – having filed the suit just weeks after the mass shooting – but he noted that the AR-15 like the one used in Highland Park is one of the most popular rifles in the U.S., and that the community’s ban on magazines holding more than 10 bullets flies in the face of what is generally standard equipment.
“A 30-round magazine is a standard capacity magazine for an AR-15,” Brown said.
Turnipseed – who is still recovering from the wounds she suffered from a gunman wielding an AR-15 – called the group’s challenge unconscionable.
“Talk about crappy timing,” she said. “The fact that someone would have the gall to file something like this, what, two months after seven people were murdered, 48 people were injured and hundreds, if not thousands of individuals were emotionally traumatized – is just plain mean.”