On September 9, 2026, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit heard oral argument in Granata v. Campbell, No. 25-1918, the constitutional challenge brought by Stefano Granata, Cameron Prosperi, The Gun Runner, LLC, and the Firearms Policy Coalition against Massachusetts’s Approved Firearms Roster. The roster decides which handguns a licensed dealer may sell. Any model the government has not pre-approved cannot be sold by a Massachusetts FFL to an ordinary resident, even though the identical firearm remains lawful to buy in forty-eight other states. Only Massachusetts and California maintain anything like it. The panel is reviewing an August 29, 2025 summary judgment for the Commonwealth by Chief Judge Denise J. Casper of the District of Massachusetts, and from Wednesday’s tenor, I expect that judgment to survive at the panel level, on reasoning that will not survive much further than that.
A Restriction on Acquisition Is a Restriction on the Right
The roster’s mechanics matter before the doctrine does. A resident who wants a handgun the state has not approved cannot buy it new from a dealer, but may buy the identical model secondhand from a private party, or from a police officer who later wants to sell one. That carve-out gives away the game: the same “unsafe” handgun is fine to own once it changes hands outside a licensed store. This is a restriction on the commercial channel through which Americans acquire arms.
That matters under the Second Amendment’s plain text. The right of the people to keep — meaning possess — and bear — meaning carry — arms cannot be exercised over an arm one is forbidden to acquire. A handgun is a protected arm under District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008), and once a restriction on acquiring a commonly owned handgun implicates that text, New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1 (2022), shifts the burden to the government to identify a historical tradition of analogous regulation. That showing is not close to met here, which is why the panel spent Wednesday reaching for two arguments that do not hold up.
The Panel’s Misread of Heller’s Commercial-Sale Dictum
The first was a stray sentence from Heller itself. The panel suggested that because Heller referenced “conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms” as presumptively lawful, the burden runs the other way here, and the challengers must disprove that presumption rather than the Commonwealth justifying its law. The actual passage:
“Although we do not undertake an exhaustive historical analysis today of the full scope of the Second Amendment, nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.”
Heller, 554 U.S. at 626–27. Read in context, that sentence lists examples the Court declined to cast doubt on — it is not a holding that such laws are exempt from Bruen’s history-and-tradition test. Every other item on the list, felon dispossession and sensitive-places restrictions among them, is analyzed under Bruen by requiring the government to prove a historical analogue. There is no textual basis to carve commercial-sale restrictions out of that same framework and hand the burden to the citizen instead.
Proving Laws Don’t Prove What Massachusetts Needs
The panel’s second move fared no better. It pointed to colonial-era “proving” laws — statutes requiring a firearm barrel be tested to withstand firing pressure before sale — as the historical tradition justifying the roster. Only two states ever enacted them: Massachusetts in 1805 and Maine in 1821. Both post-date the Second Amendment’s 1791 ratification by decades, which makes them early-nineteenth-century enactments, not founding-era ones. Two states, at different times, is not a “long-standing historical tradition” under Bruen — that requires examples spread broadly and sustained over time, and two isolated outliers cannot supply it.
Even granting the analogy, it fails on its own terms. Proving laws verified that a barrel already offered for sale would fire as designed without bursting in the user’s hand — a functional check, not an added feature. Massachusetts’s roster instead requires manufacturers to add a chamber-load indicator and a magazine-safety disconnect, design mandates that make a gun different from, not safer as, the model it already is. Millions of the same handguns sold without those features function exactly as intended everywhere else in the country. A tradition of testing that a gun works has nothing to do with mandating that it be redesigned.
A Detour Into Standing
Before reaching either history question, the panel spent real time probing whether the challengers even have Article III standing to bring some of these claims. That threshold question is not academic: standing is what gives a federal court jurisdiction to hear a case or controversy at all, and if the challengers lack it, the panel never reaches whether the roster violates the Second Amendment. That the argument opened there is itself a signal of where the panel may be inclined to land — my impression from the argument’s tenor, not anything the panel has decided.
What Comes Next
Based on Wednesday’s questioning, I expect the panel to rule for Massachusetts, on reasoning that does not survive: a Heller sentence that does not say what the panel needs it to say, and two isolated, early-nineteenth-century statutes that tested function rather than mandated design. A circuit loss built on that foundation invites further review, and the common-use logic requiring equal treatment of ordinary handguns nationwide does not stop at the Massachusetts border.
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.