Court strikes down Maryland’s 10-year anti-gun law

A federal appeals court Tuesday struck down a decade-old law in Maryland which requires Americans to first obtain a license before owning a handgun.

According to the Firearms Safety Act 2013, Maryland taxpayers who wish to own a handgun must first obtain a “handgun qualification license.” To do so, they need to submit an application and fingerprints for a background investigation, take a four-hour firearms safety training course, and wait up to 30 days for approval from the state. Even if approved, the taxpayer is only allowed to own the handgun. To carry it, a carrying permit must be obtained through an additional application process. 

Gun rights groups such as Maryland Shall Issue, along with individual stakeholders, sued Maryland Governor Wes Moore in 2016 over the law but lost the case.

But this week a three-judge panel in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the lower court’s decision and found that the law violates the Second Amendment.

“In Maryland, if you are a law-abiding person who wants a handgun, you must wait up to thirty days for the state to give you its blessing,” wrote Trump-appointee Judge Julius Richardson in the majority opinion. “Until then, there is nothing you can do; the issue is out of your control. Maryland has not shown that this regime is consistent with our Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

Judge Richardson cited this year’s “burden-shifting” Supreme Court ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. The ruling determined that according to the Second Amendment, the onus is not on a citizen to prove why they need a firearm, because the Constitution acknowledges a presumptive right. If the state wants to restrict that right, it needs to demonstrate that the restriction is consistent with other firearm regulations in United States history, particularly during the country’s founding.

But the State of Maryland was unable to do so. Richardson wrote that “the state has not presented a historical analogue that justifies its restriction; indeed, it has seemingly admitted that it couldn’t find one.”

While the state tried to argue that the handgun license law is just like other laws which prevent “dangerous people” from having firearms — such as violent felons or substance abusers — the court responded that Maryland’s handgun restriction does not target dangerous people, but all people.

“Instead, it prohibits all people from acquiring handguns until they can prove that they are not dangerous,” the court stated. “So Maryland’s law burdens all people — even if only temporarily — rather than just a class of people whom the state has already deemed presumptively dangerous.”

Obama appointee Senior Judge Barbara Milano Keenan wrote in the dissenting opinion that “the majority’s hyperaggressive view of the Second Amendment would render presumptively unconstitutional most non-discretionary laws in this country requiring a permit to purchase a handgun.”