Maine's attorney general is appealing a recent court decision that suspended a new law requiring gun buyers to wait three days before taking possession of the firearm.
Attorney General Aaron Frey is asking the First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston to reinstate Maine's 3-day waiting period on gun purchases while the case plays out. Last week, a federal judge in Maine suspended the waiting period law, handing gun owners' rights groups at least a temporary legal victory.
In the filing, Frey's office argued that waiting periods have been shown to prevent impulsive suicides and homicides.
The request to reinstate the law also says that any harm caused to the groups challenging the law "pales in comparison to the harm prevented when lives are saved."
"The undisputed evidence in the record is that waiting periods save lives by meaningfully reducing both suicides and homicides," reads the document from Frey and Chief Deputy Attorney General Christopher Taub, who filed the request. "An expert witness estimated that in one year, a waiting period would have prevented twelve suicides. This fact alone warrants maintaining the waiting period law until the First Circuit has had the opportunity to consider whether the law violates the Second Amendment."
Nearly 90% of gun deaths in Maine were suicides in 2022, according to state data.
The 3-day waiting law was part of a package of gun policy changes that passed the Democratic-controlled Legislature last year following the October 2023 mass shootings in Lewiston that killed 18 people and injured more than a dozen others. Nearly a dozen other states plus Washington, D.C., require gun purchasers to wait anywhere from three to 14 days to retrieve a firearm.
Gun owners' rights groups have cast doubt on the claims that waiting periods reduce gun deaths, however.
Several gun dealers and a self-defense school instructor filed suit last year to block Maine's new law on grounds that it infringes on Second Amendment rights. The plaintiffs have the backing of both state and national gun owners' rights groups, including the Sportsman's Alliance of Maine and the National Shooting Sports Foundation, or NSSF.
U.S. District Court Judge Lance Walker suspended the law last week, writing that it amounted to "indiscriminate dispossession, plain and simple."
"The waiting period is not narrow since it applies to very near everyone seeking to purchase a firearm and their entire right to keep and bear any firearm at all through purchase is temporarily banned," Walker wrote. "Nor is the waiting period objective since it does not permit the evaluation of facts as they pertain to the individual seeking to carry away the firearm. Sellers are not tasked with inquiring whether buyers are intent on harming themselves or others and all buyers are effectively deemed suspect."
But Taub and Frey note that waiting period laws in multiple states have consistently survived constitutional challenges.
In 2018, for instance, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed California's 10-day waiting period to remain in effect by declining to hear an appeal filed by challengers. But a 2022 Supreme Court ruling in a New York case known as Bruen has shifted the legal debate over the Second Amendment and opened the door to additional lawsuits over state gun laws. Walker repeatedly cited the court's Bruen decision in his order suspending Maine's waiting period law.
