NRA Files Lawsuit Challenging Florida’s Waiting Period Requirements for Firearm Purchases

Today, the National Rifle Association, 2nd Amendment Armory, and three NRA members, in partnership with Mountain States Legal Foundation, filed a lawsuit challenging Florida’s waiting period requirements for firearm purchases.

Florida’s constitution was amended in 1998 to impose a mandatory three-day waiting period between the purchase and delivery of any handgun sold at retail, with the only exceptions being for concealed weapons permitholders and for trade-ins of other handguns. Florida then passed a law in 2018 that broadened the waiting period to include all firearms. Now, with limited exceptions, anyone who purchases a firearm must wait a minimum of three days after the seller initiates a background check to take possession of his or her firearm, even if a clean background check comes back immediately.

Florida’s waiting period requirements are completely unrelated to the time it takes to complete a background check—even if the background check instantly comes back clean, the purchaser still must wait three days before taking possession of his or her firearm. Thus, the provisions exist only to impose an arbitrary delay and a forced period of reflection between the purchase and delivery of a firearm—in essence, they require a “cooling-off” period or in common sense terms, a time tax. 

This filing challenging Florida’s “cooling off” waiting periods comes just days after the Tenth Circuit ruled that New Mexico’s seven-day cooling-off period violates the Second Amendment in Ortega v. Grisham—another case brought by the National Rifle Association and Mountain States Legal Foundation.

“For nearly 35 years, law-abiding Floridians have had to endure unconstitutional laws that arbitrarily deny them access to legally purchased firearms,” said John Commerford, Executive Director of NRA-ILA. “Thanks to the NRA’s landmark Supreme Court victory in NYSRPA v. Bruen, illogical, nonsensical, and unconstitutional gun control laws like this are being thrown out in federal courts across the country. We are confident that our challenge today will be successful and serve as another critical step in rehabilitating Second Amendment rights in the Sunshine State.”

The case is named Dunn v. Glass, and it was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida.

Please stay tuned to www.nraila.org for future updates on NRA-ILA’s ongoing efforts to defend your constitutional rights, and please visit www.nraila.org/litigation to keep up to date on NRA-ILA’s ongoing litigation efforts.