Key Takeaways
- The Third Circuit revived the NSSF’s challenge to New Jersey’s firearms law on September 8, 2026, stating NSSF has standing to sue.
- Judge Porter criticized New Jersey’s proposed timing rule as a Catch-22 that unjustly prevented NSSF from court access.
- The court overturned an earlier decision that dismissed NSSF’s suit for lack of standing, noting that enforcement actions had begun.
- The case will now proceed to a preliminary injunction motion regarding the enforcement of New Jersey’s law.
- This ruling does not determine if New Jersey’s law is constitutional, leaving the merits of the case for further examination.
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
PHILADELPHIA, PA — The Third Circuit on September 8, 2026, reversed a federal district court and revived the National Shooting Sports Foundation’s challenge to the New Jersey firearms law the state has used to bring enforcement actions against gun manufacturers and sellers. In NSSF v. Attorney General New Jersey, No. 25-2546, a unanimous panel of Judges Porter, Matey, and Ambro held that NSSF has standing to bring the suit and that the district court was wrong to step aside from deciding it.
New Jersey’s position boiled down to timing, and the panel named the problem. “New Jersey’s proposed rule would create a Catch-22,” Judge Porter wrote for the court. “If the association sued before the enforcement action against one of its members, it would be dismissed for lack of standing, like in NSSF I. If it sued after the enforcement action, it would be dismissed under Younger.” Because NSSF and its members are “entitled to [their] own day in court,” the panel rejected the rule.
The history explains the trap. The Third Circuit threw NSSF’s original suit out in 2023 in NSSF I for lack of Article III standing. Standing means a plaintiff has to show a real, concrete injury rather than a hypothetical one, and at that point the court found the prospect of New Jersey actually enforcing the law against NSSF’s members too speculative. According to the opinion, just a few months later New Jersey started enforcement actions against gun manufacturers and sellers, including Glock, an NSSF member. The speculation was over.
NSSF moved to reopen the case, filed an amended complaint, and asked for a preliminary injunction, which is a court order blocking enforcement of a law while the case is litigated. Judge Zahid H. Quraishi in the District of New Jersey reopened the case, accepted the amended complaint, and agreed NSSF now had standing. Then he held that he was required to abstain under Younger v. Harris, a 1971 Supreme Court decision telling federal courts to stay out of ongoing state court proceedings and let the state court handle any federal constitutional claims raised there. Applied here, it meant NSSF’s federal case sat frozen while New Jersey pressed its own suits in state court.
The panel agreed on standing and disagreed on abstention. New Jersey had argued, in effect, that NSSF could not get into federal court before the state sued anyone and could not get into federal court after the state sued someone either. There is no window in that rule, and the Third Circuit said so. The district court now has to take up the preliminary injunction motion it set aside.
The federal law hanging over all of this is the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act. Congress passed PLCAA in 2005 to bar lawsuits against manufacturers, distributors, dealers, importers, and their trade associations for harm “solely caused by the criminal or unlawful misuse” of a firearm by someone else when the product functioned as designed. The law has exceptions, and the one that matters here is the predicate exception, which allows a suit only if the company “knowingly violated a State or Federal statute applicable to the sale or marketing of the product” and that violation was a proximate cause of the harm. Whether New Jersey’s law fits inside that exception or is an end run around PLCAA is the merits question, and it has not been decided.
This is a procedural win. Nothing in the opinion says the New Jersey law is unconstitutional, and the state will get to defend it on the merits. It is still a significant win. Roughly four years after NSSF first filed, no federal judge has ruled on whether the law is lawful. First the case was too early, then it was too late. That pattern lets a state enforce a law aggressively while insulating it from constitutional review, and the Third Circuit’s answer is that a trade group and its members do not lose their federal forum because the state chose to sue first.
I will continue tracking NSSF v. Attorney General New Jersey as it heads back to the district court for a ruling on the preliminary injunction.
Legislative data provided by LegiScan (CC BY 4.0, legiscan.com).
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