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.”
