For 58 years, the federal government told Americans they could own a handgun but couldn't buy one across state lines. On Friday, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals told the federal government to reread the Constitution.
The court struck down the interstate handgun sales ban, ruling it "sullies the plain text of the Second Amendment and is inconsistent with the nation's tradition of firearms regulation."
The ban traces back to the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson. That law, later expanded by the Gun Control Act of 1968, made it a federal crime to purchase a handgun outside your state of residence. The theory was straightforward government paternalism: dangerous people might cross state lines to dodge their home state's gun laws. The solution was to punish everyone.
The Fifth Circuit applied the Supreme Court's 2022 Bruen standard — the test that requires gun regulations to be consistent with the nation's historical tradition of firearms regulation — and the 1968 ban didn't survive it. The court held that the constitutional right to keep firearms necessarily includes the right to purchase them, and that prohibiting handgun purchases outside one's state of residence violates that right.
The government's defense amounted to a public safety argument: that the ban addressed concerns about individuals "deemed dangerous" who might evade state laws by buying across state lines. The Fifth Circuit wasn't persuaded. The Constitution doesn't grant rights to the well-behaved subset of the population the government approves of. It grants them to the people.
The Firearms Policy Coalition, a party in the case, has been pressing Second Amendment challenges through the federal courts on multiple fronts. This ruling hands them one of the bigger structural wins in recent memory. Interstate handgun sales haven't been legal in most Americans' lifetimes. The ban predates the moon landing.
The practical effect, if the ruling stands, is that an American could walk into a licensed dealer in a neighboring state and purchase a handgun — something that has been a federal crime since LBJ's Great Society was still in its first draft. Long guns have been available for interstate sale for years. Handguns were carved out as uniquely dangerous, as though the Bill of Rights applied differently depending on barrel length.
The timing matters too. Bruen has been methodically dismantling gun control laws that survived for decades on nothing more than legislative inertia and judicial deference. Courts are now required to do the historical homework, and laws from the 1960s keep failing the test. The Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 was passed in a political panic after the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. Panic legislation has a shelf life. Fifty-eight years was apparently it.
As AWR Hawkins noted in his Breitbart report, the ruling could open the door for Americans to buy handguns across state lines for the first time in decades. "Could" is doing a lot of work in that sentence — the government will almost certainly appeal — but the constitutional logic is now on the record, written in Fifth Circuit ink.
LBJ signed the ban in 1968. The Fifth Circuit struck it down in 2026. The Second Amendment hasn't changed a word in between.
