LAKEWOOD, Colo. (August 19, 2025) — Mountain States Legal Foundation and its Center to Keep & Bear Arms is proud to announce a significant legal victory in defense of the Second Amendment. In a powerful and decisive ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit reversed a lower court’s decision and ordered that an injunction against New Mexico’s Seven-Day Waiting Period Act be put in place.
The 10th Circuit held that the right to keep and bear arms includes a right to acquire them in the first place, and that any arbitrary delay imposed by the State through a “cooling-off” style waiting period infringes on the Second Amendment protected rights of law-abiding citizens.
The Court went on to state that “common sense dictates that the right to bear arms requires a right to acquire arms, just as the right to free press necessarily includes the right to acquire a printing press, or the right to freely practice religion necessarily rests on a right to acquire a sacred text. Legal interpretation follows that common sense.”
After affirming that acquiring, purchasing, and possessing firearms is a necessary predicate to keeping and bearing them, the Court also concluded that there was no historical analogue from the Founding era—when the Second Amendment was drafted, debated, and ratified—that supports this or any other cooling-off-style waiting period. Without an analogous law from our Founding, this waiting period law cannot survive.
“We could not have hoped for a better decision when it comes to an Appellate Court upholding our Second Amendment protected rights than the one issued by the 10th Circuit today in the Ortega case,” commented CKBA Director Michael McCoy. “The 10th Circuit reaffirmed that the Second Amendment is not a “second-class” right that can be arbitrarily delayed at the whim of the State; but a God-given right that all Americans have a right to freely and fully exercise.”
This ruling sets a strong precedent for ongoing and future challenges to similar waiting period laws in other states. Constitutional rights cannot be conditioned on arbitrary delays or bureaucratic obstacles.