New Mexico Keeps Enforcing a Seven-Day Waiting Period After Federal Judges Said No

The short version: New Mexico's seven-day waiting period for firearms purchases has already been declared unconstitutional by a federal appeals court. The state is still enforcing it anyway — against everyone except the two individuals who brought the earlier case. That is the dispute at the center of a new federal lawsuit filed this week by the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), the National Rifle Association, the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) and the New Mexico Shooting Sports Association against Attorney General Raul Torrez, asking a court to make the earlier ruling apply to their members, customers and, in effect, every other law-abiding buyer in the state.

A law the courts already ruled on

The waiting period comes from House Bill 129, enacted in 2024. It requires a buyer who has already passed the federal FBI background check to wait seven days before taking possession of a firearm. Two New Mexico residents, Paul Ortega and Rebecca Scott, challenged the law, and in August 2025 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit struck the waiting period down, overruling a district court decision in the state's favor by Senior U.S. District Judge James O. Browning. On remand, the district court granted summary judgment to the plaintiffs on Aug. 28 and, in SAF's account, issued a permanent injunction. By the ordinary rules of litigation, that should have been the end of the waiting period. Instead, state officials announced that the judgment covered only Ortega and Scott personally. "The order only states that the two named plaintiffs are able to purchase firearms without having to go through the waiting period. The law remains in effect otherwise," Michael Coleman, communications director for Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, told Source NM.

What the new complaint argues

The new lawsuit is built around that gap. "Unfortunately, New Mexico does not seem to get the message," the groups wrote in their complaint, as quoted by the Daily Caller. "Because the only plaintiffs in the Ortega case were two individuals, the New Mexico Department of Justice has taken the position that it may continue applying to everyone else in New Mexico a law that the Tenth Circuit has declared 'obviously unconstitutional.'" The plaintiffs ask the court to declare House Bill 129 unconstitutional as applied to buyers who pass the federal background check, and to enjoin the state from enforcing it against them, their customers and their members. The trade group's leadership put the same point more bluntly. "New Mexico's Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham and Attorney General Raul Torrez are blatantly and unconstitutionally enforcing New Mexico's seven-day waiting period law, despite it having twice been held to violate Second Amendment rights of law-abiding New Mexicans," said Lawrence G. Keane, NSSF's senior vice president and general counsel. "Twice now federal courts have ruled this law is unconstitutional."

The plaintiffs' case, in their words

SAF, which joined the new filing alongside the organizations from the Ortega litigation, framed the state's position as a challenge to the courts themselves. "It's incredibly concerning that state officials would flaunt a federal circuit decision and publicly boast of their intentions to continue to enforce an unconstitutional law," said SAF Executive Director Adam Kraut. "This is a slap in the face to the judicial system simply because the attorney general in New Mexico feels the Second Amendment is a second-class right. SAF is thrilled to be joining the plaintiff organizations from Ortega in this new challenge to get the rights of as many New Mexico residents vindicated as absolutely possible." Keane made the retail-side argument: criminals, he said, do not buy firearms at retail and do not submit to waiting periods, so the law's burden falls entirely on lawful purchasers who have already cleared a background check. The complaint similarly stresses that the people it seeks to cover are, by definition, buyers the federal system has already approved.

A national fight arriving in Santa Fe

New Mexico is not the only front in this argument, and both sides know the next stop could be the Supreme Court. The Daily Caller notes there is currently a circuit split on the constitutionality of waiting periods: while the Tenth Circuit struck New Mexico's law down, the First Circuit overturned a decision that had struck down Maine's 72-hour waiting period, and attorneys in that Maine case filed a petition on Aug. 25 asking the justices to take it up. A split between circuits is the classic recipe for Supreme Court review, which means the waiting-period question may be decided nationally rather than state by state. That context also explains the state's narrow reading of Ortega: so long as no court order names a broader class of buyers, New Mexico officials can keep the statute on the books for everyone else while the national question works its way upward. The new lawsuit is designed to close exactly that loophole inside New Mexico, whatever happens in Washington.

What happens next

For New Mexico buyers and retailers, nothing changes on day one: the seven-day wait remains in force for everyone but Ortega and Scott unless and until a court orders otherwise. The state's likely defenses are also visible already — that the earlier judgment, by its terms, ran to two people; that waiting periods have historical analogues; and that the First Circuit's contrary reasoning shows the constitutional question is not as settled as the plaintiffs claim. The plaintiffs' counter is the one quoted in their own filing: a law a federal appeals court has called obviously unconstitutional should not keep operating against an entire state because of how the first case was captioned. It is, at bottom, a fight about what a court ruling means — a question New Mexico's federal court will now have to answer for a second time, with a much longer list of plaintiffs attached.