On January 28, the Department of Justice’s “Second Amendment Section” led by Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, submitted an amicus curiae brief in support of gun owners in a case challenging Massachusetts’s “approved firearms roster.”
Granata v. Campbell is a Firearms Policy Coalition-backed complaint filed in June 2021 that challenges Massachusetts’ handgun regulations. The DOJ’s 26-page brief urges the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit to reverse the district court’s August 2025 decision upholding the law.
This is, by our accounting, the seventh pro-Second Amendment brief filed by the DOJ, the first of which was filed in Wolford v. Lopez, in May of last year, before the formal announcement of the new Second Amendment Section by Ms. Dhillon in December of 2025. The DOJ has also filed a pro-2A brief in the well-known New Jersey “assault weapons” ban case, ANJRPC v. Platkin.
In its recent Massachusetts brief, the DOJ makes the case that the challenged firearms roster broadly denies Second Amendment rights and is thus unconstitutional:
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. Under Supreme Court precedent, a State may not accomplish indirectly what it is forbidden to do directly: prohibit arms that fall within the Second Amendment’s core protection.
As with other similar briefs, the DOJ takes the position that, “The United States has strong interests in ensuring that these important questions are correctly resolved; that the Second Amendment is not treated as a second-class right; and that law-abiding Americans in this Circuit are not deprived of the full opportunity to enjoy the exercise of their Second Amendment rights.”
It underpins its arguments with citations from Supreme Court precedent in cases such as Heller, Bruen, Caetano, and Miller: Noting that these cases affirm that the Second Amendment protects arms “in common use,” the DOJ instructs the court that, “Whatever regulatory authority States possess, that authority does not extend to prohibiting the sale of arms that are in common use by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes.”
Kostas Moros, the Director of Legal Research and Education for the Second Amendment Foundation, provided a comprehensive legal analysis of the briefing on X, which AAG Dhillon acknowledged in a separate post.
