DOJ Just Told Minnesota Its Permit-to-Purchase Wait Is Unconstitutional

Tom Knighton at Bearing Arms dated the story September 21, 2026. The letter went out last Thursday from Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon to Governor Tim Walz and the mayors of Minneapolis and St. Paul. “Minnesota’s licensing scheme imposes unreasonable barriers to residents’ lawful exercise of their right to acquire and bear arms,” Dhillon wrote, as quoted in that report. “Minnesota’s law enforcement officers are charged with enforcing its abusive licensing scheme and actively do so. Such law enforcement misconduct is unlawful.”

The Supreme Court in Bruen blessed shall-issue permitting and then drew the line Dhillon is using. “The Court immediately cautioned against abusive ‘regimes where . . . lengthy wait times in processing license applications . . . deny ordinary citizens their right to public carry.’” The numbers in the letter, as Bearing Arms printed them: “Waiting periods for approvals from the chiefs of police in St. Paul and Minneapolis commonly exceed the statutory limit of 30 days.” “Some citizens have been forced to wait nearly 60 days.” The extra clock is not a deeper investigation. “These waiting periods apply even if a person has passed a criminal background check under the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS).” A clean NICS answer still leaves the firearm on the dealer’s shelf until the city hall queue moves.

This is the same Civil Rights Division posture that produced the San Jose fee suit. It is not a filed case against Minnesota, St. Paul, or Minneapolis. Dhillon is telling the state the permit-to-purchase machine, as run in those two cities, does not survive Bruen’s wait-time warning. A letter is not a judgment. The 30-day statute is still the statute until a court or the legislature moves it. What changed is that Main Justice put the delay in writing and called it misconduct.