Maine Hunters Not Happy With Waiting Period

Waiting periods are popular with gun control advocates. Those advocates claim they reduce crime and suicides, though all they can really show is a reduction in gun suicides at best, and even those claims are sketchy based on how gun research is run.

Still, Maine passed one in the wake of Lewiston. No one bothered to get into the fact that the killer in that attack had owned his guns for quite some time, so a waiting period wouldn’t have done anything, but that never matters when the gun control crowd gets a chance to push for the regulations they’ve long wanted.

And a waiting period is always at the top of the list.

Maine, however, didn’t have a lot of gun control because despite leaning very leftward in its politics, it also had a strong affinity for the right to keep and bear arms due to its rural hunting tradition. Now, those hunters are less than pleased.

The gun rights group that filed a lawsuit last week challenging the constitutionality of the Maine law requiring a 72-hour waiting period after purchasing a gun hopes the case makes it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

If it does, it could set a new precedent for a conservative-leaning court that in the past has allowed restrictive gun laws to stand, said David Trahan, executive director of Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine.

The lawsuit was filed Nov. 12 by Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine and Gun Owners of Maine, citing a violation of the 2nd Amendment.

In a state that broadly favors gun rights but is still reeling from a mass shooting that left 18 people dead and 13 injured, gun rights and gun safety advocates are in a balancing act of preventing further acts of violence without violating people’s constitutional rights. But Maine hunters — including one who was injured in the Lewiston mass shooting — said they hope to see the state’s latest gun law repealed.

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The state of Maine and Attorney General Aaron Frey will file a response to the lawsuit and the request for a judge to pause the law until the case wraps up. A hearing on the preliminary injunction request will likely be held in the coming months. Either side can appeal that decision to the U.S. First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston.

Now, we talked about the lawsuit previously, so this isn’t really news.

However, we need to remember that Maine is a hunting state, and a lot of hunters recognize that infringements on the right to keep and bear arms never stop with just a law or two. Yeah, they can still buy hunting rifles, but what if they realize there’s a problem the day before a hunting trip and can’t buy a new one until three days have passed?

No one is really going to enjoy that, now are they?

Far too many hunters are willing to accept gun control. Tim Walz tried to capitalize on this by presenting himself as just such a hunter. The fact that he kind of looks like Elmer Fudd didn’t really help prevent folks from calling him a Fudd, but he also represents a significant number of similar folks who think their hunting rifles aren’t on the block. They are.

It seems that a lot of hunters in Maine recognize this and are desperately trying to put an end to the encroachment on their rights.

I wholeheartedly support them in this.