If a right delayed is a right denied, then how can anyone think waiting periods for gun sales are constitutional? The very people who lash out at any delay for any other right think delaying gun sales is completely different.
But there's a good chance waiting periods may become a thing of the past.
First, let's look at New Mexico. Their 7-day waiting period went down in flames.
A federal judge on Thursday ruled against a 2024 New Mexico law that imposed a seven-day waiting period for gun purchases, but a spokesperson for Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham told Source NM on Friday that her office will almost certainly appeal the ruling.
...With the case before U.S. District Court James O. Browning, New Mexico defendants argued that the waiting-period law does not violate the Second Amendment. In an April filing, they argued the U.S. Constitution “protects the right to ‘keep’ and ‘bear’ arms — not the right to obtain new firearms instantaneously—and a short delay on a commercial transfer does not meaningfully constrain conduct protected by the Second Amendment’s plain text.”
Browning issued a final judgment Thursday that dismisses the case and orders the governor and attorney general not to require Ortega and Scott to wait seven days before purchasing a gun. His three-page ruling did not lay out why he ruled against the law.
The truth of the matter is that under the Bruen test, there's no real historical analog for waiting periods. People could walk right up to a gunsmith, buy a gun, and take it home. No delays, no nothing. They could even build their own.
And this idea that keeping and bearing arms doesn't include the right to obtain them is asinine. How can you keep or bear something you can't even get?
Yet New Mexico isn't the only front on the waiting period war, and Maine might make things even more interesting.
The fate of Maine’s law imposing a three-day waiting period to obtain a gun now lies in the U.S. Supreme Court’s hands.
Opponents of the law have filed a petition asking the high court to overturn the law as an unconstitutional violation of the Second Amendment right to keep and bear firearms.
The law, supported by the Maine Gun Safety Coalition, requires gun buyers to wait 72 hours after passing a federal background check before taking possession of the gun.
...The Supreme Court petition filing on August 25 followed the First Circuit Court of Appeals decision in April that upheld the law.
The appeals court ruling reversed the 2025 injunction by a Bangor federal judge – the chief federal judge in Maine, Lance Walker – that had put the law on hold.
This year, Republican state legislators proposed repealing the three-day waiting period, but that effort failed.
The Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine (SAM), the state’s leading gun rights organization, backed the initial legal challenge to the waiting period law. The National Shooting Sports Foundation is financing the next round of litigation, according to a SAM post on Facebook.
If the Supreme Court gets hold of this, things will get interesting.
Under its own Bruen standard, as noted previously, there's really no reason for the Supreme Court to uphold waiting periods. As Justice Kavanaugh noted in his Wolford decision, the onus is on the government to explain why a law is constitutional. The presumption is that it's not, and they have to defend it. Saying that the Second Amendment doesn't include a right to obtain guns isn't going to fly there, either.
And, honestly, I just don't see it.
Then again, this is the same court that upheld Rahimi, which allows people to be disarmed due to a restraining order, so I'm not supremely (pun fully intended) confident that this will go the way I expect. Still, though, there's a reason I have my expectations.
Maine was a long-time pro-gun state, despite its very blue lean politically. Since the Lewiston shooting, though, lawmakers there have abandoned any pretense of supporting gun rights and are running rampant over them.
Worse, the electorate is letting them.
It's going to fall to the Supreme Court to put an end to this waiting period foolishness.
