The Minnesota Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday that it won't reinstate a law to ban certain gun trigger mechanisms nor will it take down the rest of the measures it was tacked onto when the restriction passed.
Two years ago, the Minnesota Legislature passed a 1,400-page bill covering a broad swath of topics. The Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus sued over a provision that banned binary triggers — devices that can fire a round on the pull of a trigger and another on the release. The group argued the law violated Minnesota's single-subject rule.
Ramsey County District Court Judge Leonardo Castro ruled that the Legislature overstepped its bounds by lumping so many topics together and put the gun restriction on hold.
Both parties appealed portions of that ruling, but the Court of Appeals didn't depart from it. Notably, appeals judges allowed the remainder of the massive bill to stand. They cited a prior single-subject decision from the state Supreme Court.
It's possible this case heads next to the Minnesota Supreme Court.
The Gun Owners Caucus touted the ruling as a win.
“Today’s ruling is a warning to every legislator who thinks the single-subject clause is optional,” Rob Doar, president of the Minnesota Gun Owners Law Center, said in a news release. “Two courts have now told the Legislature that you cannot bury gun control provisions inside unrelated bills and call it lawmaking. If anti-gun lawmakers try this again in 2026 or beyond, we will be back in court, and we will win again.”
A spokesman with the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office said the office is reviewing the ruling and weighing potential next steps.
An attempt by Democrats in the Legislature to reinstate the binary trigger ban this year fell short.
A second lawsuit filed over the same law, by UnitedHealth Group, hasn’t gone as far. In fact, a separate panel of the Court of Appeals declined Tuesday to give the health insurance company a pathway to fight a provision regarding contracting over its own single-subject objections. The judges questioned the legal arguments raised by UnitedHealth in refusing to reinstate a lawsuit.
But one panel member, Judge Kevin Ross, added a note of frustration to a concurrence in the case.
“No one could read even the first three pages of the challenged 1,500-page law we are considering today — the offspring of nine, multi-topic omnibus bills folded into a gargantuan mega-omnibus bill — and maintain even a slight impression that she is reading a law embracing only one subject,” Ross wrote.
He said he agreed with the ultimate conclusion in the decision, but lamented how it had gotten to that point. “I write separately only to mourn the loss of the state Constitution’s single-subject clause,” Ross added.
Meanwhile, a federal Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday on a separate gun case.
The 8th Circuit Court of Appeals turned back a challenge to Minnesota’s permit-to-carry law filed by a Georgia man. The long-haul truck driver sued because he wanted Minnesota to recognize the permit laws of his home state as well as Florida, where he also has permission to carry a gun in public.
The man, Jeffrey Johnson Sr., said the federal courts should rule that Minnesota’s reciprocity law is unconstitutional on Second Amendment grounds because it requires out-of-state permits to have similar standards to those issued by county sheriffs in Minnesota.
The three-judge appeals panel upheld a lower court’s ruling that Minnesota had a legitimate process for evaluating other state permits.
“Minnesota’s refusal to exempt Johnson from a concededly constitutional permitting requirement does not impose any additional burden on arms-bearing conduct, so the convenience afforded by reciprocal permitting between states depends on interstate comity, not the Second Amendment,” Judge L. Steven Grasz wrote in Tuesday’s decision.
