Thirty days.
That’s not my number and it isn’t the Justice Department’s. It’s Minnesota’s — written into Minnesota law by Minnesota’s own legislature. You apply for permission to buy, and the state owes you an answer inside thirty days.
People are waiting sixty.
Last Thursday the DOJ put that in writing. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who runs the Civil Rights Division, sent a letter to Gov. Tim Walz and to the mayors of Minneapolis and St. Paul, aimed squarely at Minnesota’s permit-to-purchase machinery — the Transferee Permit and the Report of Transfer, which is government for the permission slip you need before a dealer can hand you anything.
Let me be obnoxiously clear about one thing, because by tomorrow afternoon somebody’s going to lean over my counter and tell me a court just killed Minnesota’s permit law.
No court did anything. There’s no case. Nobody has sued anybody, and nothing has been held, enjoined, or struck down. What exists is a letter, a demand, and a calendar. Whatever happens next hasn’t happened yet.
Notice, too, what the letter doesn’t claim. Dhillon isn’t arguing that permit-to-purchase is unconstitutional on its face, which is the argument most of us would have led with. Hers is narrower and meaner: as Minnesota actually runs the thing, it “imposes unreasonable barriers to residents’ lawful exercise of their right to acquire and bear arms.” Not the law on the page. The law as you live it.
Per the letter, as The Reload lays it out, waits up there “commonly exceed the statutory limit of 30 days,” with some residents sitting for nearly sixty. Minnesota wrote its own deadline and then treated it like a speed limit on a road where nobody runs radar.
And that’s not even the part that should stick in your teeth. The delay runs after the applicant has already passed the federal NICS check.
Here’s what that means at the counter. The federal system — the one that runs your name against every federal disqualifier there is — has already come back and said proceed. Anybody who’s stood on the customer side of a glass case with their license out has watched that check come back in about the time it takes to argue about holsters.
So what’s the extra month buying? Not an answer about whether you’re dangerous. The federal system already gave one, and the answer was no.
A delay is a denial with better paperwork.
That’s why the clock is the scandal here and not the permit. A right you can’t exercise for sixty days isn’t a right you own outright. It’s a right somebody is renting back to you on their schedule, and the rent gets paid in weeks.
It also lands hardest on exactly who you’d think. Not on the collector with eleven guns already in the safe — he’ll wait, he’s got options. It lands on somebody who decided this week that she needs one, for a reason she’d rather not have to explain to a clerk. For her, “thirty days, give or take another thirty,” isn’t an inconvenience. It’s the answer.
Now here’s where I’m supposed to spike the ball, and I’m going to decline.
Look at what DOJ actually asked for. Dhillon said the Department would consider deferring litigation if Minnesota agreed to stop enforcing the scheme, acknowledge that it’s unconstitutional, and enter a consent decree. Understand that last one before you cheer it. A consent decree is a settlement a federal judge enforces afterward. If it ever got that far, Washington would keep a hand on Minnesota’s permitting for as long as the decree ran.
That’s federal muscle applied to a state’s own law, and I happen to think the Constitution is the right reason to use it. Leaning on states that trample enumerated rights is the whole point of the Fourteenth Amendment and, on paper, the entire job of the Civil Rights Division.
But the machine doesn’t care who’s driving it. A Civil Rights Division that can put a state government on the clock over gun permits in 2026 is the same office, same letterhead, different administration in 2029. Enjoy the leverage today and you’ve agreed the leverage exists. That isn’t a reason to be against the letter. It’s a reason to read it with both eyes open instead of one.
Wednesday is the date Dhillon put on it. Minnesota can come to the table, or it can let it pass and find out whether the Department meant it.
There’s a third option that doesn’t seem to be on the table.
They could process the permits in thirty days. Their own law says thirty days. That one’s been sitting on the shelf the whole time — no letter required, no federal judge standing over anybody. Just the state doing the thing it already promised in writing it would do.
