Attempt to halt Delaware’s new ‘permit to purchase’ gun law denied by federal judge

A federal judge rejected a motion asking for an injunction to halt Delaware’s new “purchase to permit” gun law, which is set to be implemented in two days.

“The motion for expedited injunction relief is denied,” U.S. District Judge Maryellen Noreika said in her order.

Seven plaintiffs concerned with the state’s “permit to purchase” law asked for a temporary restraining order in federal court on Nov. 3 seeking to stop the gun legislation before its implementation Nov. 16. The law mandates that people receive a permit and complete gun safety training before purchasing a handgun in Delaware.

Delaware Attorney General Kathy Jennings said she was grateful for her team, including attorneys with Freshfields, who argued this case.

“This is not just a win for the State – it’s a win for everyone who has been impacted by gun homicide, gun suicide, or gun trafficking,” Jennings said in a statement on Nov. 14. “Tonight in this country the leading cause of death for children and teens will be guns; permit to purchase is the gold standard for evidence-based policies to change that. It’s too soon to declare mission accomplished – but this is a good night for common sense gun safety policy.”

Jennings blasted the gun lobby Nov. 7 for misleading and inaccurate claims made in its filings and for attempting to circumvent a pending motion to dismiss and a court order in a substantively identical case.

The plaintiffs are expected to file an appeal.

During a nearly 75-minute-long hearing before Noreika on Nov. 13, plaintiffs argued the law would leave applicants with little recourse if the state does not respond to them within 30 days.

 

Second Amendment Groups Challenge Vermont Gun Waiting Period In Second Circuit

he Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) and a coalition of prominent gun rights organizations have filed an amicus curiae brief with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, urging the court to strike down Vermont’s 72-hour waiting period for firearm purchases.

The brief supports the plaintiffs-appellants in the case, Vt. Fed. of Sportsmen’s Clubs, Inc. v. Birmingham, arguing that the district court’s previous ruling upholding the waiting period misapplied the historical test established by the Supreme Court in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen.

SAF is joined in the filing by the California Rifle & Pistol Association, the Second Amendment Law Center, the Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus, and the National Rifle Association.

SAF Director of Legal Research and Education Kostas Moros criticized the lower court’s decision, stating it “defies Bruen and Rahimi by misapplying the Second Amendment’s historical test and creating a false ‘fork’ in the analysis for so-called ‘ancillary’ rights, and by relying on unserious analogues like laws disarming intoxicated persons.”

Moros emphasized the lack of historical tradition for such restrictions, noting, “History shows no tradition of waiting periods, even as mass production made guns widely available in the 19th century.” The groups are urging the Second Circuit to “reverse and restore the proper Bruen framework.”

The brief leverages recent legal victories and historical context to bolster its claim. It notes that the Tenth Circuit recently struck down a similar waiting period in Ortega v. Grisham, and points out that several other challenges to waiting periods are currently pending nationwide.

Furthermore, the brief relies on primary historical sources, including newspaper advertisements offering firearms for sale as far back as 1745, to demonstrate a long-standing tradition of immediate access to arms.

Alan M. Gottlieb, SAF founder and Executive Vice President, characterized the waiting period as an unconstitutional infringement. “The right to keep and bear arms doesn’t have a timestamp and should be afforded to anyone wishing to legally purchase a firearm,” Gottlieb said. He concluded that “waiting periods to exercise a constitutional right are impermissible and are a direct infringement on the Second Amendment rights of peaceable citizens.”

SAF is also actively challenging similar restrictions in other cases across the country.

Second Amendment in the spotlight

If you’ve followed coverage of the Supreme Court’s 2025-26 term over the past few months, you’d likely say this term’s theme is executive power. The court already has added three major cases on the scope of presidential authority to its oral arguments docket – the tariffs dispute and two battles over removing federal agency leaders – and will have the opportunity to take up more, including cases on President Donald Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship. The court is also fielding several requests related to executive power on the interim docket, perhaps most prominently being Trump’s deployment of the National Guard.

By the time the dust settles on this term, however, the court may have also had a great deal to say about the Second Amendment. So far this fall, the justices have taken up two cases on gun rights, and they’ll be considering several additional petitions on Second Amendment issues over the next two weeks.

The landscape post-Bruen

This wave of gun cases is hitting the Supreme Court three years after it found a New York law unconstitutional that heavily restricted the ability to carry a gun in public in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. That decision, written by Justice Clarence Thomas, is perhaps best known for its text, history, and tradition analysis. As Haley Proctor explained in a recent column for SCOTUSblog, the court instructed judges tasked with resolving a gun rights dispute to determine “whether the Second Amendment’s plain text covers the conduct in which the challenger wishes to engage,” and if it does, whether the challenged law “is consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

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The Islamist Hillbillies

Fred Aaron

When I was a kid, one of my favorite shows was the Beverly Hillbillies. This farce was about a bunch of uneducated, backwards country folks who fell assbackwards into tons of money when the patriarch of the clan, Jedd Clampett, found oil on his property while hunting a raccoon for dinner. Called Texas tea, the family of poor mountain folk were suddenly millionaires (which, adjusted for 2026 dollars, but put them in the same place as the Al Thani and Elon Musk). The comedy in the series came from the fact that all that money didn’t change the Clampetts. They were still the same old hillbillies wearing country attire, eating possum, and driving their banker friends nuts.

In all humor, there is a kernel of truth, and with the Beverly Hillbillies, it showed what could happen if you found wealth through no real efforts of your own. Instead of working for it, the money is just given to you. As a result, you don’t develop in the same way you would if you had earned a professional degree, moved up in the ranks of a trade, invested well, invented something, or excelled in the arts, athletics or entertainment. Those kind of experiences change a person, and when it happens at a societal level, it advanced a culture.

So what happens on a cultural level? We actually know the answer to that question. Until oil became big commerce at the turn of the 20th century, most of the Muslim world was in decline. In fact, it had been in decline since the failure of the Ottomans at the Siege of Vienna. While Europe, Asia and the Americas went through an industrial revolution, the Muslim world stagnated. Trapped with a 7th century ideology, limited resources, and a massive chip on their shoulders, the Muslims were going nowhere fast. Until oil. That black gold changed everything.

Suddenly, the Muslim countries found themselves literally sitting on a mountain of money. However, it was money that was completely unearned, it was just the happenstance of geography and geology, combined with the internal gas engine beating out electricity to power vehicles. Oil was cheap and plentiful, and the Muslims found themselves sitting upon its largest reserves.

And just like the Beverly Hillbillies, they didn’t change a damn thing about themselves. They still wore the same clothes, bore the same grudges, followed the same ideology. They hadn’t undergone any cultural development. They hadn’t learned the life lessons that come from sweat equity. They didn’t get the development that comes from education.

So this is why we are in this situation today. A people with a 7th century ideology and a vendetta against the West suddenly found themselves with untold riches. But they continue to live like it is the 7th century. At the same time, practically everyone in their midst who tried to modernize things, drag the Muslims kicking and screaming into the 20th century wound up dead, like the Shah and Anwar Sadat.

The key difference is that the Beverly Hillbillies were well meaning. They didn’t hurt anyone (except a stray raccoon or possum that ended up in Granny’s stew pot). Sure, they drove Mr. Drysdale and Miss Hathaway crazy (they were the Clampett’s beleaguered bankers). But they didn’t send out suicide bombers, oppress other religions, and use their wealth to undermine the West. The same cannot be said for the Islamist Hillbillies. Where the Beverly Hillbillies was comedy, the Islamist Hillbillies are tragedy.

Why No One Cares About the Climate Conference.

Suppose they held an international summit and nobody came? The Brazilian organizers of the annual United Nations climate conference are close to finding out. They pulled out all the stops, including bulldozing tens of thousands of acres of rainforest to clear a new highway to the host city, Belém. International business leaders flocked to earlier summits, and 150 heads of government attended the one in Dubai two years ago. The moguls are steering clear of Brazil, though, and only 53 national leaders are making the trek (a shame, considering all those temporarily converted “love motels“).

The sudden bursting of the climate-alarmism bubble is nearly as shocking as the global shrug that has accompanied it. Not so long ago, the climate movement was widely believed to be the most urgent cause of our time. Global do-gooders flew around the world urging others to cut transportation-related greenhouse gases, agencies and bureaucracies developed plans to slash carbon emissions, and C-suites lobbied their governments for green targets and subsidies. Now Germany is trying to avoid hosting next year’s climate gabfest.

This allegedly existential threat seems to have vanished with little notice, and observers are fumbling for an explanation. Many point an accusing finger at Donald Trump, but he is far from the only bubble-burster. Xi Jinping and the emerging artificial intelligence industry have also forced decision-makers to reconsider the vast amounts of energy and attention poured into the climate crusade.

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What are Dangerous and Unusual Weapons?

In District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), the United States Supreme Court said that the Second Amendment does not protect the right to keep and bear “dangerous and unusual weapons,” it protects only arms in “common use.” In support of its conclusion, the Court cited the following authorities and case law:

United States v. Miller, 307 U. S. 174 (1939), at 179.  4 Blackstone 148-149 (1769); 3 B. Wilson, Works of the Honourable James Wilson 79 (1804); J. Dunlap, The New-York Justice 8 (1815); C. Humphreys, A Compendium of the Common Law in Force in Kentucky 482 (1822); 1 W. Russell, A Treatise on Crimes and Indictable Misdemeanors 271-272 (1831); H. Stephen, Summary of the Criminal Law 48 (1840); E. Lewis, An Abridgment of the Criminal Law of the United States 64 (1847); F. Wharton, A Treatise on the Criminal Law of the United States 726 (1852). See also State v. Langford, 10 N. C. 381, 383-384 (1824); O’Neill v. State, 16 Ala. 65, 67 (1849); English v. State, 35 Tex. 473, 476 (1871); State v. Lanier, 71 N. C. 288, 289 (1874).

Neither the Heller opinion nor any of the cited authorities and case law support that conclusion. Most of the Court’s citations are circular, but all invariably point to English common law and statutes that preceded the adoption of the Second Amendment.

Moreover, had the Court bothered to read its own citations, which in turn cited English common law and statutes, it would have discovered that England did not ban “dangerous and unusual weapons.” England’s prohibitions on the bearing of dangerous and unusual weapons (the citations point to body armor) did not prohibit the possession of those arms. What was prohibited was bearing those arms in public except for certain limited exceptions, such as quashing riots and stopping affrays (e.g., street fights).

Moreover, there was no “common use” test. England was a class-based society with restrictions on the arms one could keep and bear, depending on one’s class. For example, in feudal England, only the upper classes could keep and bear what we today call broadswords, except traveling merchants, whose social class would normally have precluded them from doing so. Not that English peasants and serfs could have afforded to purchase a broadsword.

Which isn’t to say that the lower classes never touched a broadsword. But it would have been in a public defense context, and they were not expected to purchase a broadsword or other weapons of war that they could not afford.

If there were a weapon in “common use,” it was the English longbow, which they could afford. The right to keep and bear arms, and the specific arms protected by the Second Amendment, which we American citizens have the right to keep and bear, simply cannot be reconciled with English statutory and English common law. At least not unless American citizens are analogous to Medieval English serfs and peasants. True, this is a view widely shared by judges and politicians, but it was not the view of the Founding Fathers who wrote the Second Amendment, or the American People who voted to enact the Second Amendment into law, or the view of those who wrote the Fourteenth Amendment that was likewise enacted into law by the American People.

During oral argument in my California Open Carry lawsuit, Judge Bybee put to me that the Second Amendment was based on the English Bill of Rights. I responded by saying that we expanded on those rights. Had I been given the time to elaborate, I would have reminded him that the English Bill of Rights applied only to Protestants (and only some of them), not to Catholics. And, of course, the English “right” to keep arms was a statutory right, not a fundamental right that we Americans have even if there were no enumerated Second Amendment right. Statutory rights exist at the whim of the legislature, and the English Parliament has long since ended any right to keep arms, let alone bear them for the purpose of self-defense.

Judge Bybee would go on to write the 7-4 en banc opinion in Young v. Hawaii (2021) that held there is no right to bear any concealable arm in public, openly or concealed, because their mere existence offends the king.

The United States Supreme Court vacated the Young v. Hawaii decision and threw the case back to the 9th Circuit in 2022.

With the exceptions of prohibitions on the use and/or carrying of concealed weapons, which existed from the 13th century, and throughout the history of American colonial and American states, Heller’s embracement of prohibitions on short-barreled shotguns and machine guns cannot be reconciled with the types of arms the American People intended the Second Amendment to protect when it was enacted in 1791 or when the Fourteenth Amendment was enacted in 1868.

19th-century Courts and legislatures disagreed on whether firearms that are easily and ordinarily carried concealed can be banned, but they were all in agreement that the Second Amendment protects arms used in battle.

And that included cannons, a type of arm that cannot be carried on one’s person. Heller’s exclusion of arms that one would take into battle is ahistorical and inconsistent with Heller’s first citation that justified prohibitions on “dangerous and unusual weapons” and seemingly limited the right to arms in “common use”—United States v. Miller (1939). A decision that makes no mention of “dangerous and unusual.” What Miller said was, “[O]rdinarily when called for service these men were expected to appear bearing arms supplied by themselves and of the kind in common use at the time.”

Indeed, the Supreme Court in Miller adopted the view of many 19th-century courts that the Second Amendment protects only weapons of war—”Certainly it is not within judicial notice that this weapon [short-barreled shotguns] is any part of the ordinary military equipment or that its use could contribute to the common defense.”

In 2008, when the Heller decision was published, the M-16 machine gun was part of the “ordinary military equipment,” and certainly contributed “to the common defense.”

So how did we go from the Second Amendment only protects weapons of war to the Second Amendment does not protect weapons of war?

Technically, the Heller opinion did not say that “M-16 rifles and the like” are not arms protected by the Second Amendment, but the paragraph was so poorly worded that judges have leaped to the conclusion that Heller held that they are not.

In a Fox News interview with Chris Wallace, Justice Scalia said that the Court had not decided whether hand-held rocket launchers that can bring down an airplane or firearms that can fire 100 rounds per minute are, or are not, arms protected by the Second Amendment. In the interview, Justice Scalia gave an example of what the right to keep and bear arms did not protect—walking down Main Street while carrying an executioner’s axe in a manner intended to terrorize the townfolk, as that constituted an affray.

While an executioner’s axe may have been unusual, and is certainly deadly, it wasn’t the axe per se that was prohibited; it was the carrying of the axe in a threatening manner. A woodsman’s or shipwright’s axe was commonly carried, and for certain classes of Englishmen, the carrying (bearing) of swords was required by law and custom. It was not a crime to carry them in public unless they were carried in a threatening manner.

And contrary to the defendants’ position in my California Open Carry lawsuit, which claims that simply openly carrying a firearm is, in and of itself, threatening, I have centuries of English and American common law, as well as California statutory law, saying, and California Courts holding, that merely openly carrying a firearm is not threatening.

Some people hate the mere sight of guns, and concealed carriers hate Open Carry for different reasons, but, for now, there is no Heckler’s veto of the Second Amendment.

The Supreme Court could grant an “assault rifle’’ ban cert petition, and clean up the mistakes made in Heller and NYSRPA v. Bruen, and US v. Rahimi. But I fear that if the Court does, it will simply poke more holes in the Second Amendment.

You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence.
—CHARLES A. BEARD