Maryland cannot enforce a law requiring people to obtain a license before they can buy a handgun, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Tuesday.
The state’s law requires people who want to buy a handgun to first complete steps such as submitting fingerprints for a background investigation and taking a firearms safety training course. Those are requirements for obtaining a handgun qualification license, or HQL.
In a 2-1 opinion, Circuit Judge Julius N. Richardson wrote that the law cannot stand under a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision holding that a firearm regulation is unconstitutional unless the government can show it is consistent with the nation’s historical tradition.
“The challenged law restricts the ability of law-abiding adult citizens to possess handguns, and the state has not presented a historical analogue that justifies its restriction; indeed, it has seemingly admitted that it couldn’t find one,” Richardson wrote in an opinion joined by Judge G. Steven Agee. “Under the Supreme Court’s new burden-shifting test for these claims, Maryland’s law thus fails, and we must enjoin its enforcement.”
Maryland Shall Issue, an organization that seeks to preserve and advance the rights of gun owners, and Atlantic Guns Inc., a gun store, were among those who sued over the requirement for people to obtain a handgun qualification license, alleging that it violated the Second Amendment.
The regulation was one component of Maryland’s Firearm Safety Act of 2013, enacted in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting that left 20 children and six adults dead in Connecticut.
Richardson wrote that the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling in a case called New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen represented a “sea change in Second Amendment law.”
The law, he wrote, does not prohibit people from owning handguns at some point in the future. But the regulation stops them from owning handguns now.
That’s because people cannot get a handgun qualification license until the state reviews their application, which can take up to 30 days. The regulation “deprives them of that ability until their application is approved, no matter what they do,” Richardson wrote.
Maryland, the judge wrote, also did not meet its burden in showing that there is historical evidence that justifies the law.
In her dissenting opinion, Senior Judge Barbara Milano Keenan wrote that the majority fundamentally misapplied the Bruen decision and took a “hyperaggressive view of the Second Amendment.”
The story continues at The Baltimore Banner: Appeals court strikes down Maryland’s gun license law; Gov. Moore vows to fight for law
WYPR and The Baltimore Banner have a joint operating agreement that allows the nonprofit organizations to work collaboratively to deliver quality journalism across the region. To learn more about the partnership, click here.
