Maine Attorney General Aaron Frey answers questions at the State House in Augusta in 2023. Gregory Rec/Portland Press Herald

A federal judge in Maine has denied the state’s request to temporarily restore a 72-hour waiting period on gun purchases while it waits for a federal appeals court to decide if the law is constitutional.

Maine lawmakers enacted the 72-hour law along with several other gun safety reforms following the October 2023 mass shooting in Lewiston that killed 18 people and wounded more than a dozen others. It required any gun seller who violated the waiting period to pay fines of $200 to $1,000, depending on the nature of the violation.

Chief U.S. District Judge Lance Walker sided with a group of gun rights advocates who sued the state over the law in November, asking Walker to immediately pause it.

The Office of the Maine Attorney General quickly appealed Walker’s decision to the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston, which has yet to take up the case.

Aaron Frey’s office had also asked Walker to hold off on halting the 72-hour waiting period, arguing that his decision contradicts orders in other states, and that the law saves lives by “meaningfully reducing both suicides and homicides.”

Walker wrote Wednesday that he was not swayed by either argument and that he still feels the plaintiffs’ rights under the Second Amendment would be irreparably harmed if the 1st Circuit decides to overturn the law.

“If the Act is unconstitutional — which it likely is — it will curtail the exercise of rights preserved under the Second Amendment … on a regular, steady, and ongoing daily basis (measured by nearly every firearm sale in Maine during the pendency of this litigation),” Walker wrote.

But his decision to pause the law, he said, “may or may not result in a loss of life that could have been avoided by the enforcement of the Act.”

While the state’s “loss of life” arguments were “indeed potentially weighty,” Walker wrote, he felt that the attorney general’s arguments ignored a 2022 United States Supreme Court decision that struck down a New York law requiring people to demonstrate a particular need for carrying a gun in order to get a license to carry a concealed gun in public.

Before that ruling, “the alleged lifesaving benefits of a three-day waiting period may have been relevant to the merits of a constitutional challenge … but that has not been the law of the land for nearly three years,” he said.

“This is an unsubtle point that nevertheless appears lost in the shuffle, apparently to persuade me of the wisdom of the law to compensate for its potential constitutional shortcomings,” wrote Walker.