A federal lawsuit filed in January 2025 is squaring up to deliver one of the most consequential Second Amendment wins in years — and the government’s own brief may have already sealed its fate. Elite Precision Customs, LLC v. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, No. 4:25-cv-00044 (N.D. Tex.), targets 18 U.S.C. § 922(b)(3), the longstanding federal ban preventing federally licensed dealers (FFLs) from selling a handgun face-to-face to any buyer who doesn’t reside in the dealer’s state. Cross-motions for summary judgment are pending before U.S. District Judge Mark T. Pittman in Fort Worth — and the government’s historical argument is looking very thin.
A Law That Treats Guns Differently From Everything Else
What § 922(b)(3) actually does is absurd on its face. If I travel to Texas and find a handgun at Elite Precision Customs in Mansfield that I want to buy, I cannot take it home — even as a fully law-abiding citizen. Instead, I must pay to ship it to an FFL in my home state. Try doing that with a car you find out of state. Nobody stops you at the door.
The plaintiffs — Elite Precision Customs, the Firearms Policy Coalition (FPC), and FPC members Tim Herron of New Mexico and Freddie Blish of Arizona — have stated the legal issue precisely:
“The laws at issue in this case, which bar the transfer of a handgun from a licensed dealer to a law-abiding peaceable citizen of any of the 49 states where the dealer is not located, unquestionably burdens the fundamental right. The issue for this court to resolve is simply whether the government’s ban is historically justifiable. And it is not.”
Under New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1 (2022), once the Amendment’s text covers the conduct, the government bears the full burden to justify its restriction through a historical tradition of analogous regulation. The text question — whether the right to acquire a handgun is protected at all — is where the DOJ just handed us a significant win.
The DOJ’s Concession Is a Big Deal
The Trump DOJ under Attorney General Pam Bondi has conceded that the right to acquire firearms is implicated by the text of the Second Amendment. That sounds obvious, but it is not a concession the anti-gun side gives up willingly.
The Second Amendment protects the right “to keep and bear arms.” The word “acquire” doesn’t appear in the text, but as I’ve argued in published scholarship — including in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy and other published work — enumerated rights carry concomitant or ancillary rights necessary to make them meaningful. You cannot keep or bear an arm you were never permitted to acquire. District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008), confirmed that handguns are “arms” within the Amendment’s meaning. A law restricting your ability to purchase a handgun from a licensed dealer therefore burdens the right.
With that concession in place, the burden shifts entirely to the government to produce historical evidence. That is where their case collapses.
The Government’s Historical Analogues Don’t Hold Water
The government has thrown three categories of historical laws at this case. None of them hold up.
First, colonial-era “proving laws” — barrel-testing statutes requiring proof that a barrel wouldn’t explode before sale. These are consumer-protection measures. Their principle is about protecting the buyer from a defective product, not about restricting where in America a buyer could go to make a purchase. There is no meaningful analogy to a modern law barring a citizen from buying a handgun outside his home state.
Second, rules restricting removal of arms from town armories. Read those statutes carefully and they dealt exclusively with government-owned weapons held for collective community defense. The rule was simple: public guns stay in the community they’re meant to protect. That is completely different from restricting a private citizen’s right to purchase a privately owned handgun anywhere in the country.
Third, early colonial export restrictions — many from the 1600s, predating even the English Declaration of Rights. Those rules existed because English, Dutch, and French colonies were at war with each other and sometimes funneling weapons to Indian tribes fighting rival colonists. They were national-security laws in a world of competing European powers. The how and the why bear no resemblance to a modern interstate handgun ban.
As the plaintiffs’ brief notes, the government “does not cite a single law that burdened the right of peaceful citizens to acquire arms in another state or colony in any way like the law at issue here.” Under Bruen, that is fatal.
1791, Not 1868
One more critical point: the relevant historical baseline is 1791, when the Second Amendment was ratified — not the Reconstruction era. I argued exactly this in my Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy article, “Attention Originalists: The Second Amendment Was Adopted in 1791, Not 1868,” and the plaintiffs’ brief cites it directly. Anti-gunners consistently push analysis toward the post-Civil War period because far more gun control laws were enacted then — many specifically designed to disarm freed Black Americans. The Supreme Court has confirmed 1791 as the controlling baseline, and that timing only hurts the government’s case here further.
What Comes Next
Judge Pittman will rule on cross-motions for summary judgment. My assessment is that the historical record the government has assembled is too thin and too poorly analogized to survive Bruen scrutiny. A district court win would set powerful precedent, and I think the Fifth Circuit would be inclined to uphold it. This is exactly the kind of island-hopping victory that builds the Second Amendment foundation — winning the right-to-acquire argument brick by brick.
This article is based on analysis by Professor Mark W. Smith, constitutional attorney and Host of the Four Boxes Diner 2nd Amendment channel. Watch the original video here. This does not constitute legal advice.