The National Rifle Association is challenging a longstanding Florida law that requires lawful firearms purchasers to wait for three days before taking possession of a gun after the transaction is completed.
On August 25, the NRA, along with 2nd Amendment Armory, three NRA members and the Mountain States Legal Foundation (MSLF), filed the lawsuit Dunn v. Glass in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida challenging the waiting period law on Second Amendment grounds.
At issue is the law imposed by a 1998 Florida constitutional amendment that required a mandatory three-day waiting period between the purchase and delivery of any handgun sold at retail, with the only exceptions being for concealed weapons permitholders and for trade-ins of other handguns. Florida later passed another law in 2018 that broadened the waiting period to include all firearms.
Consequently, with limited exceptions, anyone who purchases a firearm must wait a minimum of three days after the seller initiates a background check to take possession of his or her firearm, even if a clean background check comes back immediately—an injustice, if not an outright infringement of Second Amendment rights.
According to John Commerford, executive director of NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action (NRA-ILA), now is the time to have the law declared unconstitutional once and for all.
“For nearly 35 years, law-abiding Floridians have had to endure unconstitutional laws that arbitrarily deny them access to legally purchased firearms,” Commerford said in a news alert on the NRA-ILA website. “Thanks to the NRA’s landmark Supreme Court victory in NYSRPA v. Bruen, illogical, nonsensical and unconstitutional gun control laws like this are being thrown out in federal courts across the country. We are confident that our challenge today will be successful and serve as another critical step in rehabilitating Second Amendment rights in the Sunshine State.”
The complaint argues that Florida’s waiting period provisions are distinctly different from waiting periods that exist solely to afford sufficient time to conduct a background check.
“Florida’s firearm waiting periods are completely unrelated to the time it takes to complete a background check—even if the background check comes back clean instantly, the purchaser still must wait three days. Instead, these provisions exist simply to impose an arbitrary delay and a forced period of reflection between purchase and delivery of a firearm—in essence, a “cooling-off” period,” the complaint states. “Because both of the Cooling-off Waiting Period Provisions burden the right to keep and bear arms, and because the government could never meet its burden to establish a historical tradition of regulation that justifies them, they are unconstitutional under the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution, as made applicable to the states by the Fourteenth Amendment.|”
Incidentally, this new lawsuit comes on the heels of NRA’s recent court win in New Mexico. On August 19, in the case Ortega v. Grisham, a three-judge panel of the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that New Mexico’s seven-day waiting period violated the Second Amendment.
“Cooling-off periods infringe on the Second Amendment by preventing the lawful acquisition of firearms,” that court ruling stated. “Cooling off periods do not fit into any historically grounded exceptions to the right to keep and bear arms, and burden conduct within the Second Amendment’s scope.”
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