Background
Federal law generally bars unlicensed people from acquiring firearms outside their state of residence or transferring firearms to nonresidents, and bars federally licensed dealers from selling handguns directly to out-of-state residents. Although an out-of-state handgun purchase may be completed through an intermediary licensed dealer in the buyer’s home state, that process depends on a dealer’s participation and ordinarily involves added fees and delay.
Elite Precision Customs, a federally licensed Texas firearms manufacturer and dealer, alleged that it would sell handguns directly to out-of-state residents absent these restrictions. Arizona resident Freddie Blish and New Mexico resident Tim Herron alleged that they would make such purchases, and the Firearms Policy Coalition sued alongside them. The district court granted the government’s motion to dismiss and denied the plaintiffs’ summary-judgment motion, concluding that the restrictions were constitutional.
The Court’s Holding
The Fifth Circuit held that the combined restrictions in 18 U.S.C. §§ 922(a)(3), (a)(5), and (b)(3), which the court called the Nonresident Handgun Purchase Ban, violate the Second Amendment. The majority concluded at the first step of the test established in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen that the right to keep arms necessarily includes the right to purchase them. Because the provisions categorically prohibit direct interstate handgun purchases, the court held that they implicate the Second Amendment’s plain text despite the availability of dealer-to-dealer transfers.
At Bruen’s historical-tradition step, the court found that the government’s proposed analogues did not justify the ban. It characterized those laws as wartime measures, regulations of commerce with foreign sovereigns or Indian tribes, or early consumer-protection rules, rather than restrictions comparable to a peacetime ban on interstate handgun sales within one nation. The court therefore reversed the dismissal and rendered judgment for the plaintiffs. Judge Haynes dissented, stating that she would have affirmed the district court’s conclusion that the challenged provisions are constitutional.
Key Takeaways
- The Second Amendment’s protection of keeping arms encompasses commercial handgun purchases.
- An indirect dealer-to-dealer purchasing option does not prevent a categorical ban on direct interstate handgun sales from triggering Bruen scrutiny.
- The government failed to identify a sufficiently analogous historical tradition supporting the federal restrictions.
Why It Matters
The decision invalidates, within the Fifth Circuit’s analysis, longstanding federal restrictions that prevented licensed dealers and private parties from completing direct handgun transactions with residents of other states. It also deepens a circuit disagreement with the Second Circuit, which upheld materially similar restrictions based on colonial and founding-era laws governing cross-border movement of firearms and gunpowder.
More broadly, the ruling applies Bruen’s historical test at a relatively specific level of generality and rejects the premise that laws regulating commercial firearm sales are categorically outside the Second Amendment’s protection.