Key Takeaways
- Maine gun owners filed a petition on August 25 to challenge the state’s 72-hour firearm waiting period in Beckwith v. Frey.
- The law, effective August 9, 2024, requires buyers to wait 72 hours after purchase, even with a cleared background check.
- Petitioners argue the law violates the Second Amendment by forcing law-abiding citizens to wait without justification.
- The First Circuit upheld the law, contrasting with other states where similar waiting periods were ruled unconstitutional.
- The Supreme Court may review the case due to conflicting circuit court rulings on such laws.
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
WASHINGTON, DC — A group of Maine gun owners, firearm dealers and a domestic-violence survivor asked the U.S. Supreme Court on August 25 to strike down Maine’s 72-hour firearm waiting period, filing a petition for certiorari in Beckwith v. Frey after the First Circuit ruled that the law does not implicate the Second Amendment at all.
The law at issue is 25 M.R.S. §2016, which took effect on August 9, 2024. Its operative sentence is one line long: a seller may not knowingly deliver a firearm to a buyer sooner than 72 hours after the agreement. The clock runs concurrently with any background check. It does not pause for a concealed carry permit, a hunting license, or a documented threat. There is no waiver, no exception for someone facing danger tonight, and no process by which a buyer can satisfy anything and go home armed. Violations are civil infractions punished by fines of $200 to $500 for a first offense and $500 to $1,000 after that, and they are enforced against the seller, not the buyer.
The petitioners are Andrea Beckwith and East Coast School of Safety, Nancy Coshow, James White and J. White Gunsmithing, Adam Hendsbee and A&G Shooting, and TLC Gunsmithing and Armory. The respondent is Maine Attorney General Aaron M. Frey. Erin E. Murphy of Clement & Murphy is counsel of record.
The record they built is what gives the filing its weight. Hendsbee, who runs A&G Shooting in Fairfield, described a woman from a nearby town who came in days after the law took effect because a stalker was harassing her on her property and the local police, an hour’s drive away, had told her to buy a firearm. He spent more than an hour helping her pick one and signed her up for training. She passed her background check instantly. She paid. He had to send her home without the gun, and because the store was closed Sunday and Monday, she could not pick it up until the following Tuesday. A week later a married couple came in after a midnight burglary, looking for a home-defense firearm in case the burglars came back. They waited too. Coshow, a longtime gun owner who needed a smaller handgun because of a physical restriction, drove 80 miles twice inside three days. Beckwith, a domestic-violence survivor who founded a nonprofit that trains other survivors, told the court she now has to send women home at their most vulnerable hours without the means to defend themselves.
Chief U.S. District Judge Lance E. Walker enjoined the law in February 2025. Because §2016 sweeps in nearly every buyer regardless of circumstance, including those who clear an instant check at the counter, he called it “indiscriminate dispossession, plain and simple.” He found no comparable precedent before the late twentieth century. Background checks and drunken-carry laws turn on individual inquiry. A blanket waiting period, he wrote, involves “generalized assumptions and global consequences.”
The First Circuit vacated that injunction on April 3, 2026, without ever reaching history. It agreed with the Attorney General that “laws regulating the purchase or acquisition of firearms do not target conduct covered by the Second Amendment’s ‘plain text,’” treating the wait as a condition on the commercial sale of firearms and “a burden on, but not an infringement of, the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.” The panel also credited testimony from the Maine Coalition to End Domestic Violence that advocates advise victims not to obtain a firearm as part of their safety plans. Beckwith and the woman in Fairfield are the people on the other side of that.
The petition calls that analysis “wrong at every turn” and asks the justices one question: whether forcing law-abiding citizens who have already passed a background check to wait out a multi-day cooling-off period violates the Second Amendment. Cooling-off laws, it argues, “do not test a purchaser’s law-abiding nature; they test a purchaser’s patience.”
The split is the strongest argument for review. New Mexico passed a materially identical seven-day law within weeks of Maine’s, and in Ortega v. Grisham the Tenth Circuit held it “obviously unconstitutional,” then denied rehearing en banc 10-2. Florida’s Attorney General and all 20 State Attorneys went further, filing an offer of judgment conceding that their state’s 1991 three-day wait is unconstitutional. Two federal appeals courts, the same kind of law, opposite answers. That kind of disagreement is one of the strongest reasons the Supreme Court takes a case.
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Where this stands: a cert petition is a request, not a ruling. Four justices must agree to hear it, most petitions are denied, and Maine has not yet filed its response. The injunction is gone, so §2016 is enforceable in Maine right now, and the parties have jointly asked the district court to pause the case while the justices consider the petition. Anyone buying a firearm in Maine still waits three days, and holding a permit under Maine concealed carry rules buys no exception.
I will continue tracking Beckwith v. Frey as Maine files its response and the justices decide whether to take the case.
