The Justice Department sued Minnesota on Thursday over a state law that forces residents to wait as long as 60 days before they can take possession of a firearm.
The lawsuit follows a warning letter DOJ sent to Gov. Tim Walz on September 18, 2026. In that letter, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon laid out how Minnesota’s permitting system works for handguns and certain rifles: buyers either file a Transferee Report, which takes 30 days for approval, or apply for a Permit to Purchase, which gives police up to 30 days to grant it.
Dhillon said that under either path, Minnesota residents can be made to wait up to 30 days simply for the paperwork to clear — and that in practice, “some citizens have been forced to wait nearly 60 days.”
With the warning ignored, DOJ followed through with a lawsuit this week, backed by a press release laying out the government’s constitutional argument.
“The Supreme Court held that the home is where the need for defense of self, family, and property is most acute. When a person needs to defend their home, they need to defend it now, not thirty to sixty days from now,” Dhillon said. “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 core of DOJ’s argument is that citizens who have already cleared a background check are being denied a firearm for weeks or months anyway, with no additional review taking place during that delay — just a bureaucratic hold on a right the Supreme Court has already recognized as most urgent inside the home.
The case now moves into the federal courts, where Minnesota will have to defend a permitting system that has stood for years against a challenge from an administration that has made rolling back state gun restrictions a priority.
