What's behind the decline in pro-gun lawsuits?

What's behind the decline in pro-gun lawsuits?

After the Supreme Court fashioned a new test for the constitutionality of gun laws in 2022's Bruen decision, gun rights advocates pounced, inundating courts with challenges to firearm restrictions. They sought to overturn assault weapons bans and magazine-capacity limits, prohibitions on young adults buying or carrying handguns, and laws meant to create gun-free zones.

Now, the pace of challenges has slowed. In the six months of 2022 that followed the court's edict, the Second Amendment Foundation, Gun Owners of America, and other groups filed 34 suits. They filed the same number in 2023. In 2024, the number dropped sharply, to 20 suits, according to a Trace review of federal court records. Our review — which included cases aimed at loosening firearm and lobbying restrictions, and excluded hunting, business, and public records disputes — identified only seven new gun rights claims filed in federal court so far this year through June 24, 2025.

Chip Brownlee // The Trace

Interviews with people on both sides of these cases suggest a natural calming of legal waters, at least for the moment. After a wave of district court rulings, gun interests are pressing the battle at the appeals court level and have become more selective in the cases that they bring. Also, with President Donald Trump’s administration friendly to their cause, gun groups may be dedicating resources to extracting victories through the executive branch rather than the courts.

According to Alan Gottlieb, founder of the Second Amendment Foundation, which has filed more post-Bruen gun rights cases than any other organization, the drop in new suits does not signal a slackening of ambition. Under Bruen's banner, gun groups are pursuing dozens of cases at the appellate level in hopes of again winning at the Supreme Court. "We are still in an advantageous position," Gottlieb said in an email. "We expect many more victories in the next few years."

As the number of new suits has dwindled, the groups have continued to aggressively raise funds around litigation. In late May, the Firearms Policy Coalition, a frequent co-plaintiff of the Second Amendment Foundation, sent an urgent donation appeal. “FPC is preparing to unleash a MASSIVE LEGAL BLITZ on the gun grabbers, but we need to hear from you immediately in order to get underway,” the email blast read. “Our Legal Team is planning action in as many as SEVEN cases between now and mid-June.”

Either the blitz has yet to come or it has not involved new federal suits. FPC did not respond to our requests for comment, but it last filed a federal gun rights case, a challenge to Massachusetts’s handgun restrictions for 18 to 20-year olds, in February.

Chip Brownlee // The Trace

Among the frequently challenged statutes have been assault weapons bans and magazine capacity limits, but even those cases have plummeted. Fourteen states and the District of Columbia have enacted one or both such laws, often referred to as hardware bans. These jurisdictions all lean Democratic.

In the five years before Bruen, leading gun groups filed nine challenges to hardware bans. That figure doubled to 18 in the second half of 2022, following the Bruen ruling. There were seven such challenges filed in 2023, two last year, and none so far in 2025.

Bruen not only led to a deluge of fresh hardware ban cases, but also gave new life to existing ones. While every appeals court that has heard such a case has upheld the law in question, and the Supreme Court recently declined to hear challenges to two hardware bans, that's likely to change. In a statement that accompanied the Supreme Court's decision not to hear one of the challenges, Justice Brett Kavanaugh pointed to hardware ban disputes in the pipeline and wrote, "In my view, this court should and presumably will address the AR-15 issue soon, in the next term or two."

The suits that Bruen spawned have overwhelmingly been filed in states led by Democrats — those with the toughest restrictions, some adopted in response to the Supreme Court decision. Of the 95 post-Bruen suits The Trace identified, 77 were filed in states with Democratic governors. In addition to hardware bans, the groups have gone after gun licensing laws, prohibitions on carrying firearms in sensitive places, age limits, and — to a lesser extent — waiting periods for gun purchases and regulation of homemade, untraceable "ghost guns." The campaign's results have been mixed, with major setbacks and some big wins.

Andrew Willinger, the executive director of the Duke Center for Firearms Law, said that as Democratic states tightened restrictions in recent years, the rest of the country moved toward near total deregulation, a dynamic that will continue to shape Second Amendment litigation. “There is just going to be less and less out there for gun rights groups to challenge,” he said.

Gun groups have the Trump administration as an ally in their existing battles. Gottlieb wrote to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi in April and praised her creation of a Second Amendment Task Force. In the letter, Gottlieb — whose litigation efforts in recent years have been backed by infusions of anonymous financial support — urged the task force to examine "egregious Second Amendment violations in the states of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, and Washington."

On June 13, Bondi's office filed a brief with the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals siding with several gun groups — including Gottlieb's — in their effort to strike down Illinois' restrictions on assault weapons and the capacity of ammunition magazines. It marked the second time that the administration has filed such a brief in a hardware ban case. Gun groups cheered the move.

This story was produced by The Trace and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.