Key Takeaways
- The National Rifle Association and others filed a lawsuit against Illinois’s 72-hour waiting period for firearm purchases.
- The lawsuit claims the waiting period infringes on Second Amendment rights and argues it does not correlate with background checks.
- Plaintiffs detail how they completed background checks but still faced the waiting period, causing delays in obtaining firearms.
- Legal precedents from other states and recent Supreme Court decisions support the plaintiffs’ argument against waiting periods.
- The plaintiffs seek to have the statute declared unconstitutional and to stop its enforcement.
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
CHICAGO, IL — The National Rifle Association, the Illinois State Rifle Association, three federally licensed gun dealers, and five individual gun owners filed a federal lawsuit this week challenging Illinois’s 72-hour waiting period for firearm purchases.
The case, Pearlstein v. Raoul, was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. It names Attorney General Kwame Raoul and Illinois State Police Director Brendan F. Kelly as defendants, both in their official capacities.
At issue is 720 ILCS 5/24-3(A)(g), which makes it a Class 4 felony for a dealer to hand over a firearm less than 72 hours after the buyer and seller agree to the purchase. That’s true even when the buyer passes a background check in minutes, which is exactly what happened to the individual plaintiffs.
According to the complaint, plaintiff Gayle Pearlstein went to Suburban Sporting Goods in Melrose Park on July 6 to buy a Masada Slim 9mm pistol. She passed her background check within minutes, paid in full, and was told she still had to wait three days. Plaintiffs Brian Childs, Kamal Kishore, and Timothy Vik tell nearly identical stories from gun shops in Geneseo, Pekin, and East Peoria.
The lawsuit argues the waiting period has nothing to do with background checks. The statute itself says the 72-hour clock runs independently of the NICS check dealers must still complete. The complaint calls it an effort to “delay the exercise of Second Amendment rights for the sake of delay.”
The plaintiffs also point out how broad the Illinois law is compared to other states with waiting periods. There is no exception for concealed carry license holders, no exception for people facing documented threats, and no carve-out for long guns.
The dealer plaintiffs, Voodoo Firearms in Minooka, Shooting Sports in Moline, and Sacky’s Firearms in Willow Hill, describe lost sales and customers left defenseless. Voodoo Firearms owner Joseph Schiavone recounts a customer who had been beaten, watched his attacker released quickly under the SAFE-T Act, passed his background check, paid for a firearm, and still walked out empty-handed because of the law.
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The legal landscape favors the plaintiffs. The Tenth Circuit struck down New Mexico’s 7-day waiting period in Ortega v. Grisham in 2025. Last month, Florida’s Attorney General and all 20 of the state’s State Attorneys agreed in an Offer of Judgment that Florida’s own 3-day waiting period is unconstitutional. And the complaint leans heavily on the Supreme Court’s June decisions in Wolford v. Lopez and United States v. Hemani, which reaffirmed that laws burdening the ability to keep and bear arms must be justified by historical tradition.
NRA-ILA Executive Director John Commerford called the law “a blatant infringement that blocks law-abiding citizens” from exercising their rights after passing a background check.
The plaintiffs are asking the court to declare the statute unconstitutional and permanently enjoin its enforcement. Counsel includes the Law Firm of David G. Sigale, Mountain States Legal Foundation, Clement & Murphy, and NRA-ILA.
I’ll be tracking this case as it moves through the Northern District of Illinois and will report on the state’s response and any preliminary injunction ruling.
