MN Gun Owners Caucus Says Binary Trigger Ban ‘Dead’ After Court Hearing

So far this session, Minnesota gun owners have been able to fend off an avalanche of anti-2A legislation thanks to their grassroots activism, Republican House legislators, and the work of organizations like the MN Gun Owners Caucus. So far no standalone gun control bills have advanced out of House committees, where Republicans and Democrats hold an equal number of seats. Still, if the past is any kind of prologue, anti-gun lawmakers may try to pack some of these gun control measures into omnibus spending bills as they did in 2024, when they slipped a ban on binary triggers into a 1,400 page bill that dealt with dozens of different topics. 

The MN Gun Owners Caucus sued over that move, arguing that the trigger ban violated the legislature’s single subject rule. A circuit court judge agreed, and on Wednesday the Minnesota Court of Appeals heard oral arguments in the case. According to MN Gun Owners Law Center president Rob Doar, the state actually conceded during arguments that the binary trigger ban wasn’t germane to the omnibus bill. Doar believes that means the binary trigger ban is now officially dead, but the 2A group is seeking a larger victory: an end to all omnibus legislation going forward. 

🚨 BREAKING from the MN Court of Appeals 🚨

Today was the State’s appeal in Caucus v. Walz—our case challenging the binary trigger ban under the single-subject clause. We also cross-appealed to strike down the whole bill.

And in oral arguments… the State just folded.

👉 They… pic.twitter.com/1IQewoC8FH

— MN Gun Owners Caucus (@mnguncaucus) March 25, 2026

From MinnPost:

“It would be healthy to the state and to the Legislature to have a clean and full invalidation here,” said Nicholson Nelson of Upper Midwest Law Center, the lawyer for the Gun Owners Caucus.

It is unclear if Nelson had sold the judges on this sweeping solution. The panel did not issue a decision and has 90 days to produce a written ruling. 

Appeals judge Michelle Larkin noted that the only time Minnesota has ever struck down an entire omnibus bill was in a case the court considered 107 years ago. Subsequent cases have only ruled individual components unconstitutional. 

Larkin said that people generally cannot “challenge a law unless you show you have been subject to injury.” She questioned if the Gun Owners Caucus can contest parts of a law that does not deal with gun ownership. 

Nelson responded that the alternative is to have more interest groups sue over specific provisions, and since “most of this law is going to get struck down anyway” it would actually be a simpler solution to kill the entire gargantuan law.

While Minnesota AG Keith Ellison’s office may have conceded that the binary trigger ban was germane to the legislation, it still tried to defend the law itself by deploying a bizarre legal theory: If a law has already taken effect, then someone is too late to sue to stop the law. 

Ponder that for a second. Multiple courts around the country have ruled that parties don’t have standing to sue over legislation until it becomes law, because they can’t demonstrate harm from something that isn’t currently being enforced. Couple that with Ellison’s theory that once a bill has become law it’s too late to litigate, and gun owners would be stuck with a Catch-22 situation that makes it impossible to use the courts to challenge any gun control measure.

Thankfully, it sounds like the appellate court judges weren’t buying what the AG’s office was selling. 

The judges were skeptical, noted they had never heard this “codification” argument before. 

“We understand if you are nervous” about employing a brand new legal argument, Anderson told the judges, but “if the court is nervous about applying a new rule of codification, then [invalidating the entire 2024 omnibus bill] should make you very nervous.” 

Anderson also told the judges that the 2024 bill does have a single subject, and that is “operations and financing of state government.”

“Isn’t that two subjects?” Larkin responded.

Anderson replied that finances and operations go hand-in-hand in many legislative spending bills. 

It seems to me that the state’s concession the binary trigger ban wasn’t germane to the omnibus bill moots Anderson’s argument that the bill only had a single subject. Presumably, that ban would have fallen under the operations side of the “operations and financing” of state government, which goes to show that while the two may go hand-in-hand, they’re ultimately two different subjects. 

As a believer in open and transparent government, I can’t stand massive spending bills that allow for all kinds of hidden laws and goodies for special interests to be included. Sometimes it benefits Second Amendment advocates, as with the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, but all too often it can work against us, and I would love to see the Minnesota Court of Appeals rule these kinds of legislative monstrosities out of order. 

Editor’s Note: Groups like the MN Gun Owners Caucus are hard at work across the country defending our Second Amendment rights through litigation and legislative action. 

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