Narrow firearm purchase windows and in-person inspection mandates violate the Second Amendment, according to a federal appeals court.

On Friday, a divided three-judge panel for the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down Hawaii’s requirement that a person buy a handgun within 30 days of obtaining a purchase permit. It also ruled that a separate law requiring a purchaser to present the handgun to a police station for in-person inspection within five days of the purchase is similarly unconstitutional.

“The district court granted summary judgment to Plaintiffs, concluding that the challenged aspects of both provisions were ‘facially unconstitutional’ under the Second Amendment and permanently enjoining their enforcement,” Judge Daniel Collins for the majority wrote in Yukutake v. Lopez. “We affirm.”

The ruling represents a long-awaited win for gun-rights advocates against the Aloha State and its unique handgun purchase laws. The decision arrives more than two years after the Ninth Circuit heard oral arguments in the case and nearly four years after a district court judge first called the restrictions into question.

Alan Beck, who litigated the case on behalf of two Hawaii residents, celebrated the outcome.

“My co-counsel Stephen Stamboulieh and I are both very pleased to make the firearm purchase process easier for Hawaii gun owners,” he told The Reload. “Prior to this lawsuit, Hawaii had the most arduous process in the country to acquire a firearm.”

Throughout the lawsuit, Hawaii attempted to have the case tossed as moot by amending the challenged restrictions to make them less onerous. Hawaii’s law initially required an applicant to purchase a handgun within 10 days of receiving a valid purchase permit, but the state amended the requirement to 30 days shortly after the panel heard oral arguments in 2023. It also limited the in-person inspection requirement to firearms purchased from a private sale, brought in from out-of-state, or made at home.

The panel, however, rejected Hawaii’s attempt to avoid a ruling because it said the amended requirements were “sufficiently similar” to their original versions to warrant review. It first rebuffed the state’s argument that the restrictions in question do not implicate the plain text of the Second Amendment because they regulate purchasing instead of keeping or bearing arms.

“This peculiar view of the Second Amendment—as protecting the right to retain guns that you have no right to acquire—is not a fair reading of its text,” Judge Collins, a Donald Trump appointee, wrote. “No reasonable person at the time of the Second Amendment’s adoption would have thought that its text only protects the right to maintain the firearms that citizens then happened to possess at the moment of the Amendment’s adoption, nor would anyone have reasonably thought that the Amendment’s text protects only the possession of those guns that thereafter either suddenly and miraculously appear in one’s home or that the state allows you to acquire. ”

As for the historical analysis, Hawaii defended its 30-day handgun purchase permits by pointing to the Supreme Court’s general approval of permitting in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. The panel agreed that the High Court did not call into question Hawaii’s ability to impose some kind of permitting requirement on gun buying.

“Unfortunately, neither the Bruen Court in footnote 9, nor Justice Kavanaugh in his Bruen concurrence, set forth their precise reasoning for implicitly concluding that modern background-check systems satisfy the ‘how’ prong of Bruen’s historically based test,” Collins wrote. “But whatever Bruen’s unstated reasoning was, the Court’s dicta in footnote 9 must be understood as having effectively concluded that attaching modern-day background checks to the acquisition of firearms satisfies both the ‘how’ and ‘why’ aspects of Bruen’s historically based test.”

Yet, Collins also noted that the same language indicated that challenges to particular features of an “otherwise-constitutionally-valid background-check and permitting system” were okay. Collins said the High Court’s warning that requirements be guided by “narrow, objective, and definite standards” and not put toward “abusive ends” drew on First Amendment principles, which he said were also appropriate in evaluating Hawaii’s 30-day limit.

“The State has not carried this burden to justify its very short temporal limit on firearms-acquisition permits,” Collins concluded. “While the State presumably has a valid interest in ensuring that the background-check results are not stale, the State has pointed to no evidence that would support the extravagant view that anything over 10 days or 30 days counts as stale.”

On the inspection requirement, the panel determined that a more traditional Bruen analysis based on historical analogues was appropriate. Hawaii stated that colonial-era militia laws that required militiamen to present their already-owned weapons for combat-readiness inspections were a suitable match for its modern law. However, the panel took issue with the differences in both the justification and means of the comparison.

“But there are also significant differences in the ‘how’ of these laws, most notably that the inspection requirement in the colonial laws was not tied to, or a condition of, the acquisition of a firearm,” Collins wrote. “More importantly, however, the ‘why’ of the colonial laws bears no resemblance to that of § 134-3.”

The majority concluded that section of Hawaii’s law must be struck down.

Despite the decisive outcome against the state, the case prompted individual writing from all three members of the panel. Judge Kenneth Lee, another Trump appointee, wrote separately to concur in the judgment of the case. However, he questioned the majority opinion’s reliance on an interest-balancing test for evaluating when permitting requirements may run afoul of the Second Amendment.

“Judge Collins states that Bruen suggested that we should apply a limited means-end inquiry borrowed from the First Amendment’s caselaw in determining whether a permitting scheme is ‘abusive,'” Lee wrote. “But given that the Bruen court shunned interest-balancing tests, I think we should—absent clear direction from the Supreme Court—determine ‘abusive ends’ by comparing Hawaii’s temporal limit in its firearms permitting regime to relevantly similar historical analogues.”

Meanwhile, Judge Carlos Bea, a George W. Bush appointee, dissented from his colleagues entirely. He argued that the Second Amendment’s text does not apply to acquiring new firearms in the first place.

“This case could have been much more simple. The question it puts is straightforward: Does the Second Amendment presumptively prohibit the government from imposing facially neutral, ancillary regulations on the acquisition of firearms?” Bea wrote. “In my view, text and precedent alike speak with a clear voice in answering ‘no.'”

Hawaii Attorney General Anne Lopez (D.) did not respond to a request for comment. Her office can either appeal the decision to the en banc Ninth Circuit, go directly to the Supreme Court, or let it stand.

Beck cautioned that Friday’s ruling would likely not be the last word in the case.

“Even with this injunction in place, there is still a lot of work to be done, but I am happy with the progress we’ve made so far,” he said.