Key Takeaways
- The Minnesota appeals court struck down the state’s ban on binary triggers, citing a violation of the Single-Subject Clause.
- Lawmakers included the ban in an unrelated omnibus bill, which the court deemed unconstitutional.
- The court ruled to sever the binary-trigger provision while allowing the rest of the bill to stand.
- The ruling serves as a warning to legislators about adhering to the single-subject rule in future bills.
- Binary triggers remain legal in Minnesota, but the broader implications regarding legislative process are still open for debate.
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
ST. PAUL, MN — A Minnesota appeals court has struck down the state’s ban on binary triggers, and the reason is one every gun owner should understand. The Legislature did not lose on the Second Amendment. It lost because it tried to sneak the ban into a bill where it did not belong.
On May 26, 2026, the Minnesota Court of Appeals ruled in Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus v. Walz that the binary-trigger ban violates the Minnesota Constitution’s Single-Subject Clause. That clause says no law shall embrace more than one subject, and that the subject must be expressed in the law’s title. The court affirmed the lower court ruling that the ban cannot stand, and it remains enjoined and unenforceable across Minnesota.
Here is how this happened. On the final day of the 2024 legislative session, lawmakers passed a sprawling omnibus bill titled “An act relating to the operation and financing of state government.” Buried inside that bill was a provision redefining “trigger activator” to include binary triggers, which let a firearm fire one shot on the pull and a second on the release. That provision effectively criminalized owning or using them.
A binary trigger ban has nothing to do with the operation and financing of state government, and the state did not really argue otherwise. According to the opinion, the state conceded at a hearing that the binary-trigger provision was not germane to the subject in the bill’s title, and effectively conceded that it violated the Single-Subject Clause. The Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus sued in February 2025, and the district court, with Judge Leonardo Castro, agreed.
The state appealed anyway, raising two arguments the appeals court rejected. First, it claimed single-subject challenges are political questions that courts should not decide. The court noted the Minnesota Supreme Court has long treated these challenges as something courts can and do rule on, and the state itself admitted that argument was really one for the Supreme Court. Second, the state asked the court to adopt a so-called “codification rule” from Iowa, which would have treated the lawsuit as too late once the ban was folded into the statute books. The court declined, explaining that creating new policy like that is a job for the Supreme Court or the Legislature, not the Court of Appeals.
I want to be straight about the one place the Caucus did not get everything it wanted, because the win has a limit worth understanding. The Caucus argued the entire omnibus bill should be thrown out, not just the binary-trigger piece. The court said no. Following Minnesota Supreme Court precedent, it ruled that when one provision violates the Single-Subject Clause, the remedy is to sever that provision and leave the rest of the law intact. So the binary-trigger ban is dead, but the rest of that giant bill survives.
What makes that part interesting is that the judges clearly sympathized with the bigger argument. The opinion quotes the district court saying that if there has ever been a bill without a common theme, where all bounds of reason and restraint seem to have been abandoned, this is it. The appeals court wrote, plainly, “We share that concern.” A companion case decided the same day listed the bill’s wildly unrelated contents, everything from abortion and assisted living facilities to binary triggers, traffic cameras, Uber and Lyft driver pay, vaccines, and veterinary licensing, all stuffed under one vague title. The judges all but said the whole thing looks unconstitutional, but felt bound by precedent to sever rather than scrap it.
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One more honest note. This opinion is nonprecedential, meaning it does not bind future courts the way a published ruling would. The win is real and the ban is enforceably dead, but the broader fight over how far the Single-Subject Clause reaches is still open, and the state could seek review at the Minnesota Supreme Court.
The Caucus is treating it as a clean victory on the question it raised. “This is a complete victory on the question we asked the court to decide,” said Bryan Strawser, Chair of the Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus. He argued that anti-gun officials tried to slip a firearms ban into a bill where it did not belong, and that two courts have now said no.
Rob Doar, President of the Minnesota Gun Owners Law Center, framed it as a shot across the bow. He called the ruling a warning to any legislator who treats the single-subject rule as optional, and said that if lawmakers try the same maneuver again, his group will be back in court.
That is the real takeaway here. This was not a ruling about whether the state can regulate a particular trigger. It was a ruling about how laws get made, and a reminder that gun control measures slipped quietly into unrelated megabills can be challenged on the process alone. For now, binary triggers remain legal in Minnesota. I will keep tracking whether the state takes this to the Supreme Court.
Read the full article here
