Led by Montana, Half Of State AGs Petition SCOTUS To Hear Maine 3-Day Wait Challenge

We recently reported how the National Rifle Association and the Second Amendment Foundation filed a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court urging SCOTUS to hear the challenge to Maine’s 72-hour waiting period law.

Now, the heads of law enforcement in 25 U.S. states are getting in on the act. On September 29, in Beckwith v. Frey, the 25-state coalition led by Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen filed a brief with the Supreme Court urging justices not only to hear the case, but to overturn the unconstitutional law.

According to a news release from AG Knudsen, earlier this year, the 1^st Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a lower court’s decision and wrongly upheld the state’s unconstitutional waiting-period law that went into effect in 2024 and requires gun buyers to wait 72 hours before taking possession of a firearm after purchase. Knudsen and the other AGs argue that the state’s “cooling off” period infringes on Americans’ right to keep and bear arms by putting a limitation or qualification on the Second Amendment and fails the Bruen inquiry.

“This Court should grant certiorari to provide guidance on two important aspects of Second Amendment doctrine,” the AGs argued in the brief. “First, the plain text of the right to ‘keep’ and ‘bear’ arms covers the right to take possession of such arms in the first place. Forcing a person to delay taking possession of a firearm is clearly ‘a restriction’ on possession. And persuasive cases in the Second Amendment context and property law more generally recognize that taking possession is a critical part of a right to possess.”

The brief further argued that the Supreme Court should use this case “as a vehicle to apply the second step of Bruen to a mandatory ‘cooling-off’ law.”

“Maine forces law-abiding citizens who have already passed a background check to wait out a multi-day cooling-off period to address a problem—human impulsivity—that has existed since the Founding,” the AGs argued. “Yet Maine, despite submitting expert declarations on the history of American firearms regulation, failed to produce any ‘distinctly similar’ Founding-era or Reconstruction-era laws. As the district court found, there is ‘no readily comparable precedent before … [t]he late Twentieth Century.’ And even if Maine’s law addressed an ‘unprecedented societal concern’ involving ‘dramatic technological changes,’ Maine’s proposed analogues, intoxication laws and licensing regimes, are not ‘relevantly similar.’”

AG Knudson said it is critical that the Supreme Court hear the challenge and right the wrong being imposed upon Maine gun purchasers.

“The First Circuit’s misinterpretation of the Second Amendment, effectively creating ‘a second-class right, subject to an entirely different body of rules than the other Bill of Rights guarantees,’ threatens the liberty of citizens in every State,” Knudson said. “This case presents an analogous issue for ‘the right of law-abiding, responsible citizens’ to keep and bear arms.” 

Ultimately, the AGs asked the Supreme Court not only to hear the case, but to rule on it and set a precedent for lower courts.

“In sum, the 1st Circuit made a major analytical error when it held that the right to take possession of a firearm is not covered by the plain text of the right to ‘keep’ (i.e., possess) a firearm, and this Court should grant certiorari to provide guidance on this critical aspect of the constitutional right,” the brief concluded.

Attorneys general from Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, Wyoming, and the Arizona Legislature also joined in filing the brief.