US appeals court upholds Maryland handgun licensing law

By Nate Raymond

(Reuters) - A U.S. appeals court on Friday upheld Maryland's licensing requirements for people seeking to buy handguns, saying the law remained valid even after a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2022 that expanded gun rights.

The Richmond, Virginia-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in a 14-2 vote reversed a panel's 2-1 decision last year that had found the 2013 law requiring most Maryland residents to obtain a license and undergo training and background checks before buying a handgun was unconstitutional.

That licensing regime was enacted as part of Maryland's Firearm Safety Act of 2013, a gun control measure passed in the wake of the 2012 mass shooting of 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

The law requires would-be gun buyers to submit fingerprints for a background investigation and take a four-hour-long safety training course. They then have to wait up to 30 days before undergoing the rest of the usual process to buy a gun.

The full 4th Circuit reviewed the law's validity after the 2-1 panel of the court sided with gun rights advocates in November by finding the law violated the right of residents to "keep and bear arms" under the U.S. Constitution's Second Amendment.

The panel had based its conclusion on the Supreme Court's 2022 ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v Bruen, which required modern gun laws to be "consistent with the nation's historical tradition of firearm regulation" to survive a Second Amendment challenge.

Lawyers for the gun rights group called Maryland Shall Issue, which had sued in 2016 alongside two individuals and a gun store, argued that any temporary deprivation of someone's ability to buy handguns violated the Second Amendment.

But U.S. Circuit Judge Barbara Milano Keenan, in Friday's majority opinion, cited a footnote in the Supreme Court's 2022 gun rights ruling that made clear so-called shall-issue licensing regimes like Maryland's were presumptively constitutional.

More than 40 states have such shall-issue licensing laws, under which they have no discretion to deny a handgun qualification license to anyone who meets statutory requirements.

Keenan said that despite some delays that accompany such permitting processes, "this type of licensing law is presumptively constitutional because it operates merely to ensure that individuals seeking to exercise their Second Amendment rights are 'law-abiding' persons."

The National Rifle Association, which backed the lawsuit and covered the legal costs of the litigation, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston, Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Matthew Lewis)