As recounted in an August 29, 2025 post, the First Circuit heard argument on a Second Amendment challenge to Maine’s newly enacted 72-hour waiting period law. The law, as discussed in Andrew Willinger’s March 6, 2025 post, was enacted in response to Maine’s deadliest mass shooting, which took place in October 2023. The waiting period was intended to address, and hopefully prevent, firearm suicides (which at the time accounted for approximately 87% of the firearm fatalities in the state; that figure has now risen to 92% of all firearm deaths). Plaintiffs (Maine citizens including businesses and federally-licensed firearms dealers) in Maine challenged the law, alleging that it violated their Second Amendment rights. In February 2025, the U.S. District Court for the District of Maine granted Plaintiffs’ preliminary injunction motion, finding that the law implicated core Second Amendment rights and that there was no historical analogue for this deprivation. Maine appealed to the First Circuit, which heard oral argument on Monday, July 28. In early April 2026, the First Circuit, in a unanimous decision, reversed the district court and found that the 72-hour waiting period was “likely constitutional” and therefore did not warrant the entry of an injunction.
The First Circuit opinion focused on whether the challenged law implicates the plain text of the Second Amendment (step one of the Bruen analysis). Recognizing that the Supreme Court has yet to provide guidance on this regulatory issue, resulting in a split among lower courts, the First Circuit wrote, “laws regulating the purchase or acquisition of firearms do not target conduct covered by the Second Amendment’s ‘plain text.’” This is because, the Court explained:
The Amendment’s plain text guarantees an individual’s ability to keep and bear arms, which means to have and carry guns. The Act does not address this conduct. Rather, the Act imposes a limitation in some circumstances on when a person can acquire a firearm after the person purchased it. The Act thus regulates conduct that occurs before a person keeps or carries a gun. Accordingly, applying Bruen’s plain text analysis, the Act imposes conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of firearms that do not directly restrict the textual rights protected by the Second Amendment.[1]
The Court rejected plaintiffs’ argument that the waiting period “curtails conduct covered by the textual right because it interferes with ‘the act of purchasing or acquiring a firearm,’ which is a necessary precursor to keeping or bearing firearms.” Instead, the Court wrote: “If plaintiffs were correct that any law with a downstream restrictive effect of any magnitude on the Second Amendment right must be justified by an historical analogue, we think that Bruen would have prescribed a single-step analysis requiring that such laws be deemed unconstitutional unless so justified.” In reaching this conclusion, the court relied on Bruen’s footnote 9, where the Supreme Court specifically did not cast doubt on the constitutionality of “shall-issue” public-carry licensing regimes, which are “designed to ensure only that those bearing arms. . . are ‘law-abiding, responsible citizens.’” NYSPRA v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1, 38 n.9 (2022). As Bruen explained, only when the “permitting scheme can be put towards abusive ends” will the scheme be subject to a constitutional challenge.
Plaintiffs argued that the Act’s “broad inclusivity” and failure to require an individualized assessment met Bruen’s abusive ends exception, but the Court disagreed:
The Act shares the same goal as “shall-issue” regimes: to diminish the likelihood that firearms will be kept and borne by irresponsible citizens who may harm themselves or others. “Shall-issue” regimes require everyone to fulfill a condition before exercising the Second Amendment right to bear arms, regardless of whether the condition is necessary in the individual case. The Act operates similarly, although it also contains a series of exceptions designed to reduce burdens on Second Amendment interests where the risks favoring a cooling-off period are diminished. Moreover, the Act authorizes only a modest delay in the acquisition of a firearm that is no longer than federal law already permits for the completion of a background check before someone may obtain a gun. 18 U.S.C. § 922(t)(1). We therefore view the Act’s imposition of a brief waiting period as a non-abusive effort by Maine to address a documented problem arising from the immediate acquisition of firearms while remaining sensitive to minimizing the Second Amendment burdens imposed by the Act.
By deciding the case at Bruen Step 1 (what we think of as the “plain text” step), the Court needed not engage with the historical analogue analysis.
Accordingly, the Court reversed the District Court’s ruling, finding the Act to be “likely constitutional,” and vacated the preliminary injunction. The Act will now go into effect in Maine and the case is remanded for further proceedings.
The Westlaw citation for the decision is 2026 WL 914624 (1st Cir. Apr. 3, 2026).
