Maine’s 72-hour waiting period to buy firearms will not be reinstated in the short term.

Gun rights supporters challenged the law in November and convinced a federal judge to block enforcement of the waiting period, which state lawmakers passed after the 2023 Lewiston mass shooting.

Wednesday, a federal judge denied Attorney General Aaron Frey’s move to get the waiting period reinstated while an appeals court considers whether the waiting period is constitutional.

The judge said Frey has not shown that the law will likely be upheld in the appeals court.

Chief U.S. District Judge Lance Walker leaned on a 2022 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in his Wednesday decision,  That ruling found  New York’s law requiring concealed carry applicants to show “proper cause”, or a special need was unconstitutional and that the ability to bear arms in public was a constitutional right guaranteed by the Second Amendment.

Walker said the lifesaving benefits of a three-day waiting period may have been relevant before the 2022 ruling, “but that has not been the law of the land for nearly three years.”

He said “Maine’s new waiting period is inconsistent with the Nation’s history and tradition of firearm regulation.”

Walker also rejected AG Frey’s claim that there would be Irreparable Injury without the three day waiting period. He favored the claims of the gun rights supporters, saying the three day waiting period was likely unconstitutional, an infringement of the Second Amendment and not consistent with tradition.

“Given the combined weight of a likely unconstitutional legislative regime, the
ongoing daily infringement of the populace’s Second Amendment rights in the absence of the preliminary injunction, and the Act’s departure from history and tradition, I conclude that the irreparable injury element, like the merits element, favors the Plaintiffs,” said Walking in his decision released Wednesday.

AG Frey has appealed Walker’s initial decision to block enforcement of the three day waiting period to the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston, which has yet to take up the case.

Maine lawmakers enacted the 72-hour law along with several other gun safety reforms following the October 2023 mass shooting in Lewiston that killed 18 people and wounded more than a dozen others.