Elite Precision Customs v. ATF

What the court held

Elite Precision Customs, a Texas dealer, wanted to sell handguns directly to out-of-state buyers; Freddie Blish of Arizona and Tim Herron of New Mexico wanted to buy from it; and the Firearms Policy Coalition, which counts all three as members, joined them. Federal law lets a resident of one state get a handgun from a dealer in another only by routing it through a dealer in the buyer's home state — Herron said that typically costs him $30–40 and a wait. The district court dismissed the challenge. On September 18, 2026, Judge Jerry Smith, joined by Judge Kurt Engelhardt, reversed and rendered judgment for the plaintiffs. Relying on the circuit's 2025 decision in Reese v. ATF, the panel held that "the right to keep firearms logically entails the right to purchase them," that the dealer-to-dealer workaround does not keep the ban from being a purchase ban, and that the government's founding-era trade regulations, read "at a lower level of generality," were not analogous. Judge Catharina Haynes dissented and would have affirmed. The ruling does not remove §§ 922(a)(3), (a)(5) or (b)(3) from the Code: dealers outside the case remain bound (rifles and shotguns could already be bought in person from an out-of-state dealer under the statute's long-gun carve-out), and the government can still seek rehearing en banc or Supreme Court review. It is a different provision from the under-21 handgun-sale ban (§ 922(b)(1)) that the Justice Department said the same day it would no longer enforce.

Summarized from the court's opinion.

What this case is about

Whether 18 U.S.C. §§ 922(a)(3), 922(a)(5) and 922(b)(3) — which together bar buying a handgun directly from a dealer or seller in another state — violate the Second Amendment

GunMapUSA summary of the issue, not a quotation from the court.

Key Dates

• 2025-09-30 — N.D. Texas (Judge Pittman) dismisses the challenge, calling the ban a permissible delay and channeling mechanism
• 2026-09-18 — Fifth Circuit reverses 2–1 and renders judgment for the plaintiffs; Judge Haynes dissents

Sources

• U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit — retrieved 2026-09-24
• CourtListener — retrieved 2026-09-24