The U.S. Supreme Court may decide as early as today whether they will hear a case concerning the obvious unconstitutionality of a Chicago suburb’s ban on semi-automatic firearms. These firearms are clearly protected by the explicit intent of the Second Amendment to protect arms suitable for militia use by the American people.

If the court declines to hear the case and lets these unconstitutional bans stand, they will send the nation on a nearly inevitable path towards another civil war.

The high court is considering whether to accept an appeal filed by Highland Park pediatrician Arie S. Friedman, 49, who claims the ban passed by the City Council in 2013 violates the Second Amendment because it denies him the right to use his semi-automatic weapons to protect his home and family. The new law required that residents such as Friedman, who owned firearms capable of rapidly firing more than 10 rounds of ammunition, either remove them from the city, modify them or turn them over to police.

Friedman, who filed the lawsuit along with the Illinois State Rifle Association, already has lost in two lower courts. A U.S. District Court upheld the ban last year, and the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that decision. The National Rifle Association has filed a brief to the Supreme Court in support of the suit.

If the Supreme Court takes the case, Illinois would once again land at the center of the contentious legal battle over gun control. It would also raise questions about the legality of similar assault weapons bans in Chicago and other Illinois cities, as well as those in seven states, including New York and California.

Gun rights advocates have argued that rapid-firing, semi-automatic rifles are among the most popular firearms in the country for hunting, recreational shooting and self-defense and are protected under the Supreme Court’s two most recent rulings upholding citizens’ rights to bear arms. During the last seven years, the high court overturned the last remaining firearms bans in the country, in Washington, D.C., and Chicago, ruling that citizens had the right to keep firearms at home for protection.

The explicit intent of the Second Amendment as written by the Founding Fathers was to ensure that the citizenry—whom they refer to as the militia—will always be armed with weapons of contemporary military utility in order to form a counterweight to the corrupting influence of government.

The firearms specifically banned by Highland Park and other municipalities are the semi-automatic carbines and rifles best suited for that original role as imagined by the Founders in a contemporary context.

The Brown Bess was the musket used by both American Patriots and British Redcoats. The AR-15—which was in civilian hands for six years before a selective-fire variant was adopted as the general issue M16 and later the M4—is clearly the “modern musket” “in common use” as the militia arm of choice in the United States, with the American civilian owning between five and ten times as many AR-15s as the U.S. military owns M4s and M16s.

If the Supreme Court fails to take up the case, or takes up the case and decides against Freidman, then they will have set the stage for an inevitable civil war, pitting the nation’s radical anti-gun Democrats who desire to destroy the Second Amendment against the 100-140 million American gun owners who will not comply with laws and court decisions that clearly fly in the face of original intent.

The court’s decision could come as soon as today.

May they chose wisely.