The bottom line
The Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division filed an amicus brief on January 26, 2026 in the First Circuit Court of Appeals in Granata v. Healey, a lawsuit challenging Massachusetts’ handgun roster as unconstitutional. The DOJ sided with the plaintiffs. This matters far beyond Massachusetts because of what it signals about how the federal government is now approaching state gun control laws, and because the Massachusetts roster is one of the most egregious examples of a state using bureaucratic process to ban firearms it is constitutionally prohibited from banning outright.
Attribution from Bearing Freedom. Watch the original video. Commentary, not legal advice.
What the Massachusetts handgun roster actually is
Massachusetts maintains what it calls an Approved Firearms Roster: a list of handguns that licensed dealers are permitted to sell to private buyers. If a handgun is not on the list, dealers cannot sell it. The state characterizes this as a consumer safety measure. The state is lying.
To get onto the roster, a manufacturer must submit a handgun for state testing that includes criteria like melting point standards, trigger-pull weights, drop testing, and the inclusion of specific safety features. These requirements are not neutral. They are designed to exclude modern handgun designs from the civilian market in Massachusetts.
The practical effect: the Glock 17 Gen 5, the current production standard for police departments across the country and one of the most thoroughly tested and proven handguns in existence, cannot be sold by Massachusetts dealers to private buyers because it does not comply with the Attorney General’s additional regulations under 940 CMR 16.00, separate from the roster itself. Glock Gen 3 models appear on the roster because they were submitted and approved years ago, but the company stopped pursuing Massachusetts compliance for new generations. The result is that Massachusetts buyers cannot purchase the current production version of the most popular service pistol in the world at a licensed dealer.
The Sig Sauer P320, which the U.S. military selected as the M17 and M18 service pistol, has only recently seen compliant variants added to the roster. Modern optics-ready pistols that are standard issue for American law enforcement are largely unavailable in Massachusetts dealer channels because the roster functions as a perpetual barrier to new firearms entering the market.
The roster currently contains roughly 1,100 to 1,300 entries, but the majority of those are historical entries for models no longer in active production. The functional list of handguns a Massachusetts buyer can actually purchase at retail is a fraction of what is available to buyers in every other state. This is not consumer protection. This is state-administered market exclusion applied to a constitutionally protected product category.
Why this is obviously unconstitutional
The Constitution does not say the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed unless the state has developed a bureaucratic approval process. It says the right shall not be infringed. Full stop.
In District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), the Supreme Court established that the Second Amendment protects commonly owned arms in common use for lawful purposes. Handguns, Heller said explicitly, are the quintessential self-defense weapon. They are in common use throughout the country. The Court held that Washington D.C.’s handgun ban was unconstitutional. In New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022), the Court reinforced this standard and added a history-and-tradition test: restrictions on firearms must be consistent with the historical tradition of firearm regulation in this country.
No court has ever located a historical tradition of state governments maintaining approved lists of permitted handgun models. There is no 18th or 19th century analog to a government roster system that excludes specific models from retail sale based on trigger-pull weight. Massachusetts cannot point to Founding-era precedent because none exists.
The DOJ’s amicus brief makes exactly this argument. The filing states: “Although the Commonwealth characterizes its regime as a set of safety regulations, the effect of the law is to bar ordinary citizens from acquiring widely owned and commonly used arms.” It then applies the Bruen framework directly: “A State may not accomplish indirectly what it is forbidden to do directly: prohibit arms that fall within the Second Amendment’s core protection.”
That is a clean, accurate statement of the law. Massachusetts knows its roster is constitutionally indefensible under Bruen. The District Court ruled in favor of Massachusetts twice. The First Circuit is not historically sympathetic to Second Amendment claims. The state is banking on the appeals court upholding the restriction and forcing the issue to the Supreme Court, where the outcome is less certain under current composition than gun rights advocates would like.
Why the DOJ filing matters strategically
The DOJ is not a party to Granata v. Healey. It filed as an amicus, which means it is lending the weight of the federal government’s legal position to the plaintiffs without taking over the case. This is how the executive branch signals to federal courts where it believes the constitutional boundary sits.
Harmeet Dhillon, the Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division, has been explicit about her strategy. She wants every state regulation that is inconsistent with Heller and Bruen to be struck down, settled, or withdrawn before she leaves office. Her office created a new Second Amendment Rights Section within the Civil Rights Division, putting firearms rights enforcement on the same institutional footing as immigrant rights, disability rights, and educational opportunity. That is not a cosmetic change. That is a structural commitment of DOJ resources and legal personnel to fighting state gun laws.
The December 2025 lawsuit against the U.S. Virgin Islands over its gun-permitting process, the California case over Los Angeles County’s years-long concealed carry permit delays, the Massachusetts amicus brief: these are pieces of a deliberate litigation strategy. Dhillon and her team are picking the clearest constitutional violations in the most restrictive jurisdictions, litigating them with the institutional weight of the Department of Justice behind them, and building a case record that the Supreme Court will eventually have to address directly.
This is how constitutional change actually happens. Individual plaintiffs and organizations like the Firearms Policy Coalition and the NRA do the heavy lifting of initial litigation. The DOJ entry signals to judges that there is federal interest in the outcome and provides additional legal resources and credibility to the constitutional arguments. In the First Circuit, which has not been a reliable defender of Second Amendment rights, a DOJ amicus filing is not going to be ignored.
The “process is the punishment” playbook
I want to explain something that gun control advocates understand and most gun owners do not spend enough time thinking about. State-level gun restrictions since Heller have largely not been outright bans. They have been layers of bureaucratic process designed to make lawful gun ownership so complicated, expensive, and legally risky that a meaningful percentage of people opt out.
The Massachusetts roster is the clearest example. A buyer cannot walk into a gun store and buy the handgun they want. They can buy from an approved list that excludes most current production models. If they want a Gen 5 Glock, they must find one through private transfer channels or find a law enforcement officer who can access the LE-only market. They pay a premium for the inconvenience. The state does not need to ban the gun outright. It just makes acquiring it difficult enough that many people give up.
This is the same logic behind sensitive places laws that create invisible legal tripwires throughout daily life. It is the same logic behind safe storage laws written with enough technical complexity that even gun store employees cannot reliably explain what is legal. It is the same logic behind magazine bans that criminalize magazines you have owned legally for years without ever notifying you. The law itself is not the primary enforcement mechanism. The threat of accidental non-compliance is. Make the rules complicated enough, and law-abiding people self-censor.
The constitutional problem with this approach is that the Supreme Court has said governments cannot use process to accomplish what they cannot accomplish directly. If Massachusetts cannot ban the Glock 17 Gen 5 outright because it is a commonly owned arm in common use for lawful purposes, it cannot ban it functionally through a roster system. The DOJ’s brief makes this exact argument. The state cannot launder a constitutional violation through an administrative approval process.
What I actually think about the DOJ under this administration
I am not going to pretend the current DOJ is a perfect defender of gun rights. It is not. Attorney General Pam Bondi supported open carry bans in Florida, supported restrictions on 18 to 20-year-olds purchasing handguns in Florida, and supported red flag laws in Florida. Those are real positions that I disagree with. If you are a gun rights absolutist, you are not going to find anyone in the current administration who agrees with you on everything, and that is fine, because that is not how government works.
What I can tell you is that the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division is doing more concrete, on-the-ground work to challenge state gun control laws than any DOJ in my lifetime. They are not just talking about the Second Amendment. They are filing briefs, opening cases, hiring attorneys, and building out institutional infrastructure to sustain this work past any single political appointment. That matters because the alternative, a DOJ that refuses to engage with state gun control violations, was the operating condition for the better part of the last two decades, and we got buried under layer after layer of restrictions that the federal government simply declined to contest.
The Massachusetts handgun roster has existed since 2001. It has been challenged in court before, and courts have previously upheld it. It took Bruen to create the legal framework to attack it properly, and it took a DOJ willing to enter the fight to bring federal weight to bear on the First Circuit. Both of those things are true right now, simultaneously. That is genuinely rare.
What this means for gun owners beyond Massachusetts
Most gun rights commentary focuses on the specific state at issue in any given case. Massachusetts is a small state. Not many of you reading this live there. But the precedent set in Granata v. Healey will apply across the First Circuit, which includes Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Puerto Rico. More importantly, whatever the First Circuit decides will eventually feed into the Supreme Court’s developing Second Amendment jurisprudence.
California has a similar approved handgun roster, enforced with equal aggressiveness. New York, New Jersey, and Hawaii have their own equivalents. These laws all share the same constitutional defect: they use administrative preclearance to exclude commonly owned firearms from the civilian market in their states. If the First Circuit strikes down the Massachusetts roster, or if the DOJ’s entry into the case eventually forces the issue to the Supreme Court, the precedent will not be limited to Massachusetts.
Dhillon has said the strategy is to target outlier states with the clearest constitutional violations. Massachusetts, California, and New York are the obvious targets because they have the most aggressively unconstitutional laws and the largest populations of gun owners being denied rights that citizens in 47 other states take for granted. You cannot fix gun rights in America without fixing them in the major coastal states, because those states represent an enormous portion of the country’s population.
The Massachusetts fight is not just Massachusetts. Pay attention to it.
Attribution from Bearing Freedom. Watch the original video. Commentary, not legal advice.
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