Trump DOJ Submits Brief in Massachusetts Handun Roster Case

On January 28, 2025, Harmeet K. Dhillon filed an amicus curiae brief for the Trump administration, detailing the reasons the Massachusetts handgun roster is unconstitutional under the Second Amendment.  Harmeet K. Dhillon is Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division. The timeline for the lawsuit started almost five years ago.

In 2021, a number of Massachusetts residents and the Firearms Policy Coalition (FPC) filed suit against then AG Maura Healey in Massachusetts, contending the Massachusetts handgun roster violated the rights protected by the Second and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution.  On May 19, 2022, the District Court granted a motion to dismiss the case, claiming the handgun roster regulations were allowed as “safety requirements”.  Plaintiffs appealed the ruling to the ruling to the Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.  On April 7, 2023, the appeals court remanded the case back to the District Court, to be reconsidered under the Supreme Court Bruen Decision. On August 29, 2025, the District Court granted summary judgement to the Defendants (State of Massachusetts) for a second time. Plaintiffs appealed the ruling to the Court of Appeals for the First Circuit for a second time on September 9, 2025.  The lawsuit is now Granata v Campbell, as Andrea Joy Campbell is the current AG of Massachusetts.

The amicus brief filed by the Trump administration Civil Rights Division, makes several important arguments in the case. In particular, the brief shows the following:

• Supreme Court precedent: Arms which are in common use may not be banned.
• Regulations on the sale of arms may not be used to effect a ban
• Bans do not have to be complete to be unconstitutional
• The American people decide what arms are in common use, not judges.
• Some arms are clearly not in common use, such as ICBMs or nuclear weapons.
• Some arms may be at the margins of common use, but handguns are not at the margins.
• The right to keep and bear arms includes the ancillary right to acquire arms.

The brief by the Civil Rights Division makes clear how courts are to determine whether a law infringes on the rights protected by the Second Amendment. The procedure is spelled out in the Bruen decision.  From the brief:

Bruen makes clear that whether a law “infringes” the right to bear arms is a legal conclusion, based on text and history. See Bruen, 597 U.S. at 79 (Kavanaugh, J., concurring) (“The Court employs and elaborates on the text, history, and tradition test that Heller and McDonald require for evaluating whether a government regulation infringes on the Second Amendment.”). 

The Supreme Court has repeatedly stated, all rights have limitations. The limitations of the rights protected by the Second Amendment are dependent on what the right to keep and bear arms meant at the time the Second Amendment was ratified in 1791. As examples, the right to keep and bear arms did not mean a person had the right steal a weapon because they did not possess one. It did not mean a person with a weapon had the right to use the weapon to murder another person without consequence.

The Civil Rights Division brief shows there were no bans on the purchase of weapons which were in common use at the time of the ratification of the Second Amendment. The Massachusetts handgun roster bans guns in common use from commercial sale in Massachusetts.  From the brief:

 It is thus undeniable that the weapons banned by the Massachusetts scheme are “widely legal and bought by many ordinary consumers” across the Nation. See Smith & Wesson Brands, Inc. v. Estados Unidos Mexicanos, 605 U.S. 280, 297 (2025). For this reason alone, the decision should be overturned.

The arguments put forward by the Civil Rights Division do not show if a weapon is not in common use, it may be banned. They show weapons in common use cannot be banned, even if circuitous and indirect means are used by a state government to effectuate a partial and incomplete ban.

The submission of an amicus brief by the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice shows the Trump administration is committed to aggressively preventing state governments from infringing on rights protected by the Second Amendment. No other federal administration has been willing to do so.

The earliest federal infringement on rights protected by the Second Amendment appears to be the ban on the mailing of handguns put into place in 1927.  The Office of Legal Counsel in the Trump Department of Justice has issued an opinion the ban on the mailing of handguns violates rights protected by the Second Amendment.

Restoring rights protected by the Second Amendment is a process which must be built in the law and the courts, bit by bit, because the infringements were put in place little by little, over time.  Mark Smith, Constitutional Attorney, winner of two Gundie Awards for the Top Voices of the 2A , and AmmoLand contributor, explains the process in a video about the Civil Rights Division brief at his YouTube channel.

Analysis:

For the last hundred years, the federal government has been unwilling to enforce rights protected by the Second Amendment. The reasons are complicated and numerous. The people of the United States have been demanding the restoration of those rights, with building momentum, starting about 1968. The administration of President Trump is, in part, a political force put into place to effect the restoration of Second Amendment rights. The process is ongoing.

©2026 by Dean Weingarten: Permission to share is granted when this notice and link are included.

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