The U.S. Supreme Court will let Maine's 72-hour waiting period on firearm transfers remain in place, at least for the time being, after denying cert in a case challenging the denial of a preliminary injunction that would have halted enforcement of the law.
A U.S. District Judge granted the preliminary injunction in Beckwith v. Frey, but that decision was overturned by a panel of judges on the First Circuit Court of Appeals, who ruled that the law in question doesn't implicate the Second Amendment at all and is merely a condition on the sale of firearms.
SCOTUS will let that decision stand after denying the cert petition filed by the Beckwith plaintiffs, though the lawsuit itself will still proceed towards a final judgment in district court.
The odds of any one case being granted cert are pretty long, of course, and the Court tends to want to wait until a lawsuit has been fully adjudicated before it grants cert, but there were a couple of factors that were in Beckwith's favor.
First, there's a circuit court split on the issue, with the Tenth Circuit granting a preliminary injunction against New Mexico's seven-day waiting period (New Mexico declined to file an appeal with the Supreme Court after losing at the circuit court). SCOTUS tends to wait until a split has developed before wading into an issue, and here a live controversy already exists.
We've also seen the Court grant cert to one other Second Amendment challenge at the preliminary injunction stage; the Wolford lawsuit challenging Hawaii's "vampire rule" that the Court struck down last term.
I was also hoping that the sheer audacity of the First Circuit's assertion that an artificial "cooling off period" imposed by the state does not implicate the right to keep and bear arms would be enough to pique the interest of at least four justices, but it appears that wasn't the case.
There was one sign that the Court was going to deny cert. On September 24, Maine Attorney General Aaron Frey formally waived his right to respond to the cert petition, and none of the justices requested that Frey go ahead and file a reply. That's a pretty big tell that SCOTUS isn't particularly interested in a case, at least at the moment.
The issue itself isn't going away, though, and I suspect the circuit court split isn't going to resolve itself. The First Circuit says that waiting periods don't implicate our Second Amendment rights, suggesting that a state could implement a delay of weeks or months if it wanted to. The Tenth Circuit says that waiting periods do implicate our right to possess firearms, and New Mexico has been unable to identify any analogous laws from our nation's history that suggest these state-imposed delays are a part of the tradition of gun ownership and regulation.
SCOTUS may have decided to kick this particular can down the road for a term or two, but Beckwith will almost certainly be back before the Court in the future, and Ortega may be appealed on final judgment as well. Sooner or later the justices will have to resolve this split, but for now it looks like they're content to let it percolate a little longer.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their extreme gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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