Appellate court says Maine’s 3-day waiting period on guns is likely constitutional

By Kevin Miller, Maine Public

A federal appeals court ruled Friday, April 3 that Maine’s 72-hour waiting period on gun purchases is likely constitutional, handing gun control advocates a significant victory in a high-profile Second Amendment case.

Maine’s Democratic-controlled Legislature approved the 72-hour waiting period law two years ago as part of a suite of gun measures passed after the October 2023 Lewiston mass shootings that left 18 people dead. But a group of gun owners, gun shops and other advocates challenged the constitutionality of the waiting period. And in February 2025, a federal District Court judge in Maine blocked enforcement of a law that he described as “indiscriminate” because it applied to all gun buyers.

But on April 3, a three-judge panel on the First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston disagreed.

“The (law) briefly delays acquisitions of firearms from commercial dealers,” reads the ruling. “But it does not prevent a law-abiding and responsible citizen from obtaining and then keeping or bearing a firearm after fulfilling the waiting period requirement. In our view, this likely renders the (law) a burden on, but not an infringement of, the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.”

The appellate court vacated U.S. District Court Judge Lance Walker’s preliminary injunction blocking the law and sent the case back for further proceedings.

Maine is one of roughly a dozen states that have some sort of waiting period on gun buyers. The stated goal is to reduce suicides and impulsive acts of violence by imposing a “cooling off period” on purchasers. Suicides account for about 90% of gun deaths in Maine annually.

Waiting period laws have been challenged repeatedly in court — and most have been upheld as constitutional. So gun owners’ rights groups in Maine and nationally were energized by Walker’s ruling, regarding Maine’s case as a potential avenue to undo waiting period laws across the country.

“Citizens wishing to purchase a firearm are dispossessed of one for 72 hours exclusively by operation of the act’s requirement that everyone be subjected to a ‘cooling off’ period, even those who have passed an instant background check at the (firearms) dealer’s counter,” Walker wrote in his February 2025 decision. “That is indiscriminate dispossession, plain and simple.”

But the First Circuit judges described Maine’s law as imposing a “modest delay” that is no longer than the maximum three days that the federal background check system has to return a result on a buyer.

“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,” the judges wrote.