Even after a buyer clears a background check, Maine makes the dealer hold the firearm for three days. The First Circuit upheld that delay without requiring the state to justify it against America’s history of gun laws.
A woman facing a stalker went to a Maine gun store after police suggested she buy a firearm for home defense. According to the petition now before the Supreme Court, she selected a gun, arranged training, passed her background check immediately and paid. She still went home without it. Maine required the dealer to hold the firearm for 72 hours; because the store closed Sunday and Monday, she could not pick it up until Tuesday.
That is what a government-mandated “cooling-off” period looks like to someone who needs to defend herself now.
On September 22, the Second Amendment Foundation and National Rifle Association filed a brief urging the Supreme Court to hear Beckwith v. Frey, the challenge to Maine’s firearm waiting-period law. Their brief targets a ruling with implications far beyond a three-day delay: The First Circuit held that laws regulating the acquisition of firearms do not directly regulate conduct covered by the Second Amendment’s plain text.
If a court can place acquiring a gun outside that text, the government can burden gun ownership at the counter while claiming it has left the right to “keep and bear” arms untouched.
Maine’s Clock Runs After the Background Check
Maine law generally bars a seller from delivering a firearm until 72 hours after reaching a purchase agreement. The clock runs concurrently with a required background check, but an instant approval does not end the wait. The statute exempts certain sales, including sales to law enforcement officers, corrections officers, specified security personnel and dealers, as well as certain family transactions and sales for which no background check is required. It contains no general exception for a buyer who has cleared a check and faces an immediate threat. Sellers face civil fines for violating the delivery rule.
As AmmoLand reported when the First Circuit ruled in April, a federal district judge had preliminarily blocked the law after finding the challengers likely to prevail. The appeals court vacated that injunction and sent the case back. It did not decide whether Maine could identify a historical tradition supporting a mandatory delay. Instead, it characterized the wait as a condition on the commercial sale of firearms, presumptively lawful unless plaintiffs show it is “abusive” toward Second Amendment rights.
SAF and the NRA argue that this “abusive” threshold lets judges decide how much of an infringement they will tolerate before the government ever has to account for history. Bruen rejected judicial interest balancing in Second Amendment cases. A buyer cannot keep a gun the state refuses to let the dealer deliver.
The History Maine Never Had to Defend
The SAF–NRA brief also challenges an argument Maine made below: that ready access to firearms is a modern development, so historical buyers effectively faced built-in waits caused by travel, limited inventory or production time. The groups point to newspaper advertisements offering stocked firearms for sale, including muskets in 1745, pistols in 1792 and thousands of muskets in 1806. A buyer’s travel time or a mail-order shipping delay was never the equivalent of a law ordering a local dealer to withhold a gun already available for sale.
Those advertisements show firearms being offered in quantity; they do not document every individual transaction. The legal question is whether Maine can identify a historical tradition of imposing a mandatory delay on peaceable purchasers otherwise eligible to take possession. The First Circuit never required the state to answer it.
Other courts have confronted that question more directly.
In Ortega v. Grisham, the Tenth Circuit held that New Mexico’s seven-day waiting period implicated the Second Amendment and rejected the state’s historical defense. A federal judge subsequently ruled for the two purchasers in that lawsuit, but AmmoLand reported that the resulting injunction protects those plaintiffs, not every New Mexico buyer.
Colorado’s three-day waiting period is also under challenge. AmmoLand documented a concrete consequence this summer: the existing wait moved the practical deadline to begin certain purchases ahead of the effective date of Colorado’s new restrictions on specified semiautomatic firearms. A delay on paper can close a real window to take possession.
The Supreme Court has not granted review in Beckwith. Maine’s response to the petition is due September 28. The justices now have an opportunity to decide whether a state can force a lawful buyer to wait after clearing a background check—and whether a lower court can avoid Bruen’s historical test by calling acquisition merely a step that happens before keeping and bearing arms.
The Second Amendment does not begin three days after a background-check approval. A right that depends on the government’s clock is a right the government controls.
About Duncan Johnson:
Duncan Johnson is a lifelong firearms enthusiast and unwavering defender of the Second Amendment—where “shall not be infringed” means exactly what it says. A graduate of George Mason University, he enjoys competing in local USPSA and multi-gun competitions whenever he’s not covering the latest in gun rights and firearm policy. Duncan is a regular contributor and editor-in-chief for AmmoLand News and is responsible for AmmoLand’s daily gun-rights reporting and industry coverage.
