DOJ Calls Time on Minnesota’s Second Amendment Waiting Game

For too long, Minnesota Governor Tim Waltz and his anti-gun allies in the state have treated the exercise of a constitutional right as something subject to government permission and whatever wait is required for the government to get around to granting it. Fortunately, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) apparently has had enough of the waiting.  Late last week, the DOJ filed suit challenging Minnesota’s permit to purchase scheme that includes waiting periods and administrative delays that impermissibly stand between law abiding citizens and their ability to acquire lawful firearms.

 The principle should not be difficult to understand: “A right delayed is a right denied,” as Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon posted on X last week in her warning to Minnesota ahead of the lawsuit. In the DOJ’s press release she made clear, “The Supreme Court held that the home is where the need for defense of self, family, and property is most acute. When a person needs to defend their home, they need to defend it now, not thirty to sixty days from now.”

Far too many politicians need a forceful, sometimes litigation-driven, reminder that the Second Amendment is not some abstract future opportunity to keep and bear arms reliant upon when government officials can get around to processing paperwork. Minnesota nevertheless requires many prospective firearm purchasers to obtain government permission before completing a lawful acquisition. This process can potentially take 30 days or sometimes up to 60 days, as has been reported, and the DOJ has now warned that these delays cannot be dismissed as administrative inconveniences when they postpone the exercise of the Second Amendment.

The U.S. Supreme Court in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen distinctly warned that governments simply cannot do this. Although the Court suggested that some narrowly objective licensing requirements are not necessarily unconstitutional, it specifically cautioned that even permissible regimes can be abused through lengthy wait times or exorbitant fees that would deny citizens their rights.  As Justice Thomas noted:

“[B]ecause any permitting scheme can be put toward abusive ends, we do not rule out constitutional challenges to shall-issue regimes where, for example, lengthy wait times in processing license applications or exorbitant fees deny ordinary citizens their right to public carry.”

This nuance matters as applied to Minnesota, and the message from this DOJ is that it is and will be increasingly difficult for Minnesota and similarly anti-gun states to ignore. NRA will never tire of reiterating that the Second Amendment is not a second class right and government bureaucracy is not a constitutional loophole allowing rights to be rationed according to a government timetable.

DOJ is hardly alone in putting various bureaucratic barriers under the constitutional microscope. NRA has long been fighting these unconstitutional regimes with important developments just in the past few months on the issue.

NRA, in Ortega v. Grisham, successfully challenged New Mexico’s seven-day waiting period in a case that went all the way to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. In Michigan, NRA and its partner’s case in Moser v. Nessel challenges the state’s permit-to-purchase and handgun registration regime under the Second and Fourteenth Amendments.  In Colorado, NRA has joined Del Toro v. Polis, a federal challenge to the new permit-to-purchase law to acquire commonly owned semi-automatic firearms. Just last week, NRA-ILA filed an amicus brief with the United State Supreme Court to challenge Maine’s 72-hour waiting period.

Together, these cases put the same fundamental questions before the courts about whether a government may institute regimes that put up barriers such as government permission slips and waiting periods for law-abiding citizens before they exercise their Second Amendment rights.

The growing body of litigation by NRA as well as Second Amendment partners underscores the larger constitutional point now confronting Minnesota. Government cannot save a burden on the Second Amendment by calling it a process nor can an enumerative right be arbitrarily placed into a waiting room.