What can you do in 72 hours in Maine? Thanks to a federal court ruling in Bangor, you can once again purchase a firearm from a licensed dealer AND take possession of it immediately following your passing the background check. On February 13, 2025, Chief Maine U.S. District Judge Lance Walker issued a Preliminary Injunction against Maine’s 72 Hour Waiting Period for firearms.
You may read the Order here: http://oddstuffing.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/72H-WP-PI-GRANTED.pdf
Maine’s 72-hour waiting period was enacted in 2024 as a knee-jerk reaction to the horrific October 2023 attack in Lewiston. The attack, which would have been prevented by multiple federal, state, county and local agencies IF they had used the tools already at their disposal, would NOT have been prevented by 72 hour waiting period. Yet the law, passed using creative parliamentary maneuvers in Maine’s legislature and allowed to go into effect without the Governor’s signature, all to protect venerable politicians from voter repercussions, still cites the October 2023 attack as the reason for the law.
As expected, Maine’s Attorney General has appealed the ruling and demanded the injunction be stayed. The accompanying statement included: “Any harm to plaintiffs is speculative at best and pales in comparison to the harm prevented when lives are saved,”
Unpacking this a bit, the Attorney General appears to mock Second Amendment protected rights as “speculative” and indicates the greater good of the State’s position. This argument harks back to the old legal standard which only needed the justification of “promotes an important interest”.
Among the arguments made by the Attorney General was that the Second Amendment does not protect the right to acquire, only “keep and bear arms”, an argument which has already been struck down.
Maine cited “studies” indicating just a 48-hour waiting period offered a “cooling off period” for individuals who may be contemplating violence or suicide. Advocates believe the waiting period could have saved 12 lives in one year alone. These so-called “studies”, contracted research conducted by the gun control community itself with a specific predetermined outcome, did not examine any incidents in Maine to come to the conclusion it would have saved 12 lives, only that the statistics say it would have.
Also argued were state waiting periods to buy guns date back a hundred years. California, New Jersey, and South Dakota imposed the first ones in the 1920s and 1930s to permit police probes of buyers. At the same time let’s recall Bruen overturned a 100-year-old law in New York. The 1920’s are hardly a founding era analogy against the right to keep and bear arms no more stridently than laws that existed in the Colonial or Reconstruction periods.
Since Bruen, all Second Amendment related laws must be consistent with the “text, history, and tradition” of the country, with the burden of proof falling on the State when a law is challenged.
A couple of excerpts from the Preliminary Injunction:
“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. “That is indiscriminate dispossession, plain and simple.”
The law is indiscriminate as someone who has already purchased and possesses one or many firearms and passed a National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) check which is supposed to screen out those with previous violent criminal, mental health and drug use backgrounds has no possible way to pass any ‘test’ to avoid the waiting period.
Judge Walker argued against the Attorney General’s claims that the Second Amendment only grants a right to keep and bear arms, without granting an absolute right to purchase them. Also, that “However, the threshold inquiry is whether the Second Amendment covers the conduct curtailed by the Act, not a qualitative assessment of how modest the imposition on the right happens to be.”
“Plaintiffs showed that the bill violates the Second Amendment of the Constitution, that they will suffer irreparable harm if no injunction is issued, that they are favored by the “balance of equities,” meaning that the plaintiff will be harmed more by a lack of injunction than the defendant would be by the injunction, and that the injunction will serve the public interest.”
The simple fact this Preliminary Injunction has not been stayed by the First Circuit Court of Appeals, now at 11 days as of Monday the 24th, is significant. Out in the ‘Nutty Ninth’, this would have been stayed before the ink was dry on the injunction. Hell, even the most Constitutional/Second Amendment friendly federal judge in the Ninth Circuit now issues a stay with an injunction because he knows Kalifornistan’s direct line to the Nineth Circuit will get it shut down immediately.
Maine is ranked as the safest state in the nation not because of do-nothing-for-public-safety-gun-control laws, but because of the absence of them.
While you ponder the constitutional considerations of Maine’s 72 Hour “Cooling Off Period”, I’d like you to consider this.
On February 25, 2025, H.P. 381 was filed in the Maine House of Representatives. This bill, entitled “An Act to Amend the Maine Death with Dignity Act to Ensure Access by Qualified Patients” allows an attending physician to waive a portion or all of a waiting period for qualified patients to access end-of-life medication based on the qualified patient’s condition and the attending physician’s medical opinion regarding the best interests of the qualified patient.
Yes, you read that correctly. The State of Maine wants to waive the waiting period for physician assisted suicide but will defend a 72-hour waiting period for firearms because of the risk of suicide. What’s the difference? Suicide is a-okay if it is state sponsored and approved, but giving you access to a firearm you could also use to defend your own life, and the life of your family is way too risky.
So, California, Hawaii, Washington, New Mexico, Colorado, Vermont and New Jersey with firearm waiting periods AND assisted suicide laws, is suicide only acceptable went it is state sponsored and approved? You’ve already demonstrated that your law-abiding citizens’ defense of their own lives and the lives of their families isn’t important to you, unless the state – the one who has no legal obligation to defend you, is the one who is doing it.
Bob
For suicide prevention resources, please see: https://www.nssf.org/safety/suicide-prevention
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