Gun Rights Advocates Notch Big Win in Maine

A right delayed is a right denied, and waiting periods for gun purchases are literally a delay in exercising your rights.

This alone is a reason to oppose them.

Maine passed one anyway, though, and that led to the inevitable challenge. Legal battles are long and arduous things that can take years to come to fruition. But gun rights advocates in the state have taken an early and important win in their battle against the recently passed 72-hour waiting period requirement.

The judge agreed to issue an injunction preventing it from going into effect.

A federal judge on Thursday put a hold on a new three-day waiting period for gun purchases in Maine after reviewing a lawsuit filed against the rule by gun rights groups.

Maine’s new gun rule took effect in August and was one of several gun control measures the state’s Democratic-controlled Legislature passed after an Army reservist killed 18 people in Lewiston in October 2023 in the deadliest shooting in state history. Gun rights advocates challenged the waiting period law and asked for it to be paused pending the outcome of their case.

The gun advocates contend the law violates their 2nd Amendment rights. Federal judge Lance Walker wrote that the act “employs no standard at all to justify disarming individuals,” and that the plaintiffs are likely to succeed.

Boom.

First, let’s note that continuing to invoke Lewiston in this discussion really irks me. That’s because the killer there had owned guns for years before he committed that shooting. A waiting period would have done nothing if one had been in place prior to the killings. This has nothing to do with Lewiston, it has everything to do with this being a high-priority agenda item for anti-gun groups and lawmakers and this was their opportunity to do so.

The big problem at all for waiting periods in general, though, is that under a legal standard like intermediate scrutiny, it was easy to defend such a law, but that doesn’t apply to gun control casts anymore. Now, judges have to look at the text, history, and tradition about gun rights in this country, particularly around the time of the nation’s founding.

If you look there, you won’t find anything that remotely looks like a waiting period for gun sales. Nothing at all.

That means it’s unlikely the courts will uphold any waiting period if they’re applying the standard correctly. That doesn’t mean all of them will, but sooner or later, it should come out in the wash and waiting periods be overturned.

In this case, the judge is pretty clear that the plaintiffs are likely to succeed in their lawsuit. That’s likely, at least in part, because of the Bruen standard that’s now in place.

This is a huge win for folks in Maine, which might be a longtime Democratic stronghold but has also been a pretty pro-gun state before all of this. A lot of people want their right to keep and bear arms respected, including a lot of Democrats there. Now, the courts have stepped in to fix where lawmakers have infringed.

Again, that’s a big win.