The Justice Department sued Minnesota on Thursday over the state’s waiting period for firearm purchases, escalating a fight that the Trump administration previewed just a week earlier, according to Breitbart News.
The suit targets Minnesota’s permit-to-purchase framework for handguns and certain rifles, which the department says forces residents who have already cleared a background check to cool their heels for weeks before they can take possession of a gun.
A warning letter, then a lawsuit
The legal action follows a September 18 letter that Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon sent to Gov. Tim Walz (D), putting the state on notice that litigation was coming over what the department characterized as a permit-to-purchase “scheme.”
In that letter, Dhillon laid out the two paths Minnesota offers residents who want to buy a handgun. The first is a Transferee Report, which takes 30 days to be approved. The second is a Permit to Purchase, for which applicants must give police “up to 30 days to grant” approval.
Either route, Dhillon argued, leaves Minnesotans waiting up to a month to be allowed to buy a firearm. Some residents, she wrote, “have been forced to wait nearly 60 days.”
Those figures formed the backbone of the government’s case once the letter turned into a filing.
Dhillon: ‘They need to defend it now’
The department paired the lawsuit with a press release announcing the filing, quoting Dhillon on the constitutional stakes as the administration sees them.
“The Supreme Court held that the home is where the need for defense of self, family, and property is most acute,” Dhillon said. “When a person needs to defend their home, they need to defend it now, not thirty to sixty days from now.”
She continued: “Law-abiding citizens do not need government permission to purchase a firearm, and forcing a citizen who has already passed a background check to wait up to sixty days to obtain a firearm is intolerable under the Constitution.”
The language echoes the reasoning in recent Supreme Court gun-rights decisions, which have centered the home as the core zone of Second Amendment protection. By framing the waiting period as a burden imposed on people who have already cleared a background check, the department is arguing that Minnesota’s process adds delay without adding a corresponding safety justification — at least in the government’s telling.
What Minnesota’s law actually requires
Minnesota is one of a handful of states that require would-be gun buyers to obtain a permit before completing certain purchases, rather than relying solely on the federal instant background check system. Under the state’s framework, a buyer can either submit a Transferee Report — which triggers a waiting period — or apply for a Permit to Purchase through local law enforcement, a process that gives police up to 30 days to act on the application.
In practice, Dhillon’s letter said, the two options can stack into a longer delay for some residents, producing waits approaching two months.
The Walz administration has not yet publicly responded to the filing, according to the Breitbart account. Minnesota officials have previously defended permit-to-purchase requirements as a tool for preventing impulsive acts of violence and keeping guns out of the hands of people who are legally barred from having them.
Part of a broader push
Thursday’s suit is the latest in a series of moves by the Trump Justice Department against state-level firearms regulations. The department’s Civil Rights Division, now led by Dhillon, has signaled an appetite for challenging permitting regimes and waiting periods in states that go beyond federal minimums.
The Minnesota case will likely turn on how courts weigh the state’s asserted public-safety interests against the burden the waiting period places on individuals who have already passed a background check — the precise group the department argues should not face additional delay. That question has become a recurring fault line in post-Bruen litigation across the country, where courts have been asked to scrutinize whether older gun regulations can be squared with the historical tradition of firearm law in the United States.
For now, the dispute is headed to court, with the government seeking to invalidate at least the waiting-period components of Minnesota’s purchase process. The outcome could shape how far states can go in slowing firearm acquisitions — and how quickly the Trump administration’s litigation strategy produces rulings that other states will have to reckon with.
Reporting on the filing and the preceding letter was originally published by Breitbart News, whose Second Amendment columnist AWR Hawkins covered the developments.
Source: www.breitbart.com — https://www.breitbart.com/2nd-amendment/2026/09/25/trump-doj-sues-minnesota-gun-purchase-waiting-period/