We knew the moment election returns were announced that Michigan was going to have some kind of new gun control law. It was really just a matter of time, and sure enough, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has signed a universal background check bill and a mandatory storage bill into law.

The thing about gun control laws, though, is that they never go unchallenged. You can pass anything you want, but it doesn’t mean it’ll be permitted to stand.

And the challenge to Michigan’s law sure didn’t take long at all.

Filed in the Court of Claims, the Great Lakes Gun Rights and Michigan Open Carry alleged both the House and Senate suppressed speech and discriminated their viewpoints by not allowing enough time to testify on gun legislation before it made its way through the legislature.

The groups are asking for a temporary restraining order, or an immediate temporary ruling from the judge.

“For a political party so concerned with protecting democracy, the Democrat majorities ran roughshod over democracy when they effectively silenced one side of the gun control debate. This is a dangerous precedence to be set by either party, which is why we are challenging it,” Brenden Boudreau, director of Great Lakes Gun Rights, said in a statement.

In other words, the rules weren’t followed in such a way as to help facilitate these bills being passed, so the bills themselves should be null and void.

They’re not wrong.

However, I fear that even if the groups get everything they want, it’ll just push it back a year or so before these same measures are passed correctly. That’s because lawmakers in Michigan don’t value people’s right to keep and bear arms.

Still, that doesn’t matter here and now.

What matters now is that there are rules that need to be followed. That includes hearing from the opposition. If Michigan Democrats were that confident they could pass the bills, why try to exclude dissenting opinions? Why not make sure all the details were followed so as to prevent exactly what’s happening now?

Maybe my gut here is wrong and there was a real shot at defeating this bill and Democrats couldn’t allow that to happen.

Either way, this is now in the judge’s hands, and while this doesn’t address the constitutionality of these laws–and I have serious issues with them on that level–it does address another issue, and that’s anti-gun lawmakers pulling fast ones to get their preferred policies turned into law.

Considering many of these same people will screech about the importance of protecting democracy, it seems kind of rich.

My hope is that the judge bounces these measures and makes the state pass them again, this time doing it correctly. I also hope that it turns out there isn’t as much actual support for these laws once people know the facts surrounding all of them.

Michigan is no safer with these laws on the books and we all know it. Maybe lawmakers there could learn it in the near future, preferably without having to do so via stories of innocent people killed because of the laws they passed.