A coalition of gun groups, led by the National Rifle Association, filed a lawsuit this week against Michigan officials, aiming to take down the state’s law mandating prospective gun buyers get a license to obtain a firearm.
The NRA’s lawsuit, filed earlier this week in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Michigan, alleges the state’s “License to Purchase” scheme violates the Second Amendment by imposing “discretionary, standardless, and abusive conditions on the exercise of the right to keep and bear arms.” The Michigan law requires someone seeking to purchase, carry, possess, or transport a firearm to obtain a license to purchase a firearm, a process which the plaintiffs claim results in “arbitrary denials and the erroneous deprivation of a fundamental constitutional right.”
The plaintiffs also claim that the process violates due process rights under the 14th Amendment, arguing it “provides no constitutionally adequate appeal process, no neutral decisionmaker, no adequate notice of disqualifying conditions, no mandatory disclosure of the information relied upon, no meaningful opportunity to contest adverse information, and no procedure capable of reliably correcting erroneous denials.”
“No law-abiding citizen should ever be forced to beg for government permission to exercise a fundamental constitutional right,” John Commerford, executive director of the NRA Institute for Legislative Action, said in a statement. “The right to self-defense is not a privilege granted by politicians—it is a God-given, constitutionally enshrined guarantee. We will not rest until Michigan’s permit-to-purchase scheme is struck down and Second Amendment rights are restored to every law-abiding Michigander.”
The case has been assigned to U.S. District Judge Robert Jonker, a nominee of President George W. Bush. While the Justice Department has not weighed in on the NRA’s lawsuit in Michigan, it has backed other lawsuits that have taken aim at gun laws, specifically around registration processes in other jurisdictions.
In Los Angeles, the DOJ filed a lawsuit last year over allegedly unreasonable delays with the county’s approval of concealed carry weapons permits for citizens. The lawsuit filed in federal court in September 2025 claimed the delays with the approval process amounted to a violation of the Second Amendment. The DOJ also filed a lawsuit in December 2025 against the U.S. Virgin Islands over its delays in approving citizens for gun permits and its imposition of unlawful requirements in the process, among other lawsuits aimed at gun permitting schemes.
The Supreme Court is weighing various gun cases it could take up for future arguments, including five cases over laws aimed at banning “assault weapons” and high-capacity magazines, along with deciding two gun cases it heard arguments in earlier this year.
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The three pending “assault weapons” ban petitions include National Association for Gun Rights v. Lamont and Grant v. Higgins, which both deal with a Connecticut law, and Viramontes v. Cook County, which deals with an Illinois law. The two challenges to high-capacity magazine bans include Duncan v. Bonta, which deals with a California law, and Gator’s Custom Guns v. Washington, which deals with a Washington law. All five cases were scheduled for discussion at Thursday’s closed-door Supreme Court conference, and decisions on whether the high court plans to take up any of the cases could come as early as Monday.
Among the remaining 20 cases the Supreme Court has yet to rule on before the end of the current term in the coming weeks, a pair involve disputes over gun laws. In Wolford v. Lopez, whether Hawaii’s law banning handgun owners who have a concealed carry permit from bringing their weapon onto private property unless the owner or manager has given the person “express authorization to carry a firearm on the property” is constitutional is the key question for the justices to resolve. In United States v. Hemani, the legality of a federal ban on unlawful drug users from possessing firearms is the central dispute. The Supreme Court is next set to issue opinions on Thursday.