The Basics
On October 5, 2026, the Supreme Court declined to hear Johnson v. Jacobson, No. 26-255, a challenge to Minnesota’s refusal to recognize certain out-of-state carry permits. The order leaves the Eighth Circuit’s ruling in place and leaves unresolved whether a law-abiding citizen must obtain a separate firearm license in every state he crosses.
The denial is not a decision on the merits. It is a decision not to decide. Four justices must vote to grant certiorari, and this petition did not get them. No justice wrote to explain the denial or to dissent from it. The questions the case presented remain open for a later vehicle, a different circuit, or a clearer factual record.
Those questions go to the practical reach of the right to bear arms in public. Jeffrey M. Johnson, Sr., a Georgia resident and long-haul truck driver, holds a Florida Concealed Weapons License and a Georgia Weapons Carry License. Minnesota does not recognize either. When he drives through the state, the law requires him to unload his handgun and secure it rather than carry it for self-defense. The Liberty Justice Center sued on his behalf, arguing that the Second Amendment does not stop at a state line. The lower courts disagreed. The Supreme Court, for now, has let that disagreement stand.
The Driver and the Statute
Johnson is not a Minnesota resident and does not seek a Minnesota permit as his preferred path. He already completed the licensing process in two states that issue permits to qualified applicants. He makes regular trips into or through Minnesota as part of his work. The dangers of long-haul trucking are part of the record in the case: he carries a handgun for self-defense and wants to keep doing so lawfully when his route enters Minnesota.
Minnesota Statute section 624.714 generally requires a permit to carry a pistol in public, including in a vehicle. The requirement applies to residents and nonresidents. County sheriffs issue permits to applicants who meet the statutory criteria. The state also maintains a reciprocity list under section 624.714, subdivision 16(a). Holders of permits from recognized states may carry in Minnesota as if they held a Minnesota permit. Georgia and Florida are not on that list. According to counsel for Johnson, Minnesota declines to recognize permits from fifteen other states.
The practical result is a patchwork. A permit that is good enough for Florida or Georgia is not good enough, in Minnesota’s judgment, to let the same person carry while passing through. A driver who has already been screened, trained, and licensed must either go without the means of self-defense, lock the firearm away, or stop and complete Minnesota’s own process, including any in-person and fee requirements that process imposes on a nonresident.
David A. McCoy II was a co-plaintiff in the district court. The appeal that reached the Eighth Circuit, and the petition that reached the Supreme Court, were prosecuted in Johnson’s name against Bob Jacobson in his official capacity as Commissioner of the Minnesota Department of Public Safety.
How the Case Reached the Court
The Liberty Justice Center filed the lawsuit on January 7, 2025, in the United States District Court for the District of Minnesota, No. 25-cv-54. The complaint sought declaratory and injunctive relief under 42 U.S.C. section 1983. The claim was that Minnesota’s reciprocity statute violates the Second Amendment by forcing a licensed nonresident to obtain yet another license before he may bear arms in public for self-defense.
The district court dismissed the claim. Judgment was entered on September 11, 2025. Johnson appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, No. 25-3036. A panel of Judges Bobby E. Shepherd, Ralph R. Erickson, and L. Steven Grasz heard the case. Judge Grasz wrote the opinion, filed May 26, 2026. There was no dissent. The court affirmed.
Johnson then petitioned for a writ of certiorari. The petition was filed on August 24, 2026, and docketed on August 27 as No. 26-255. Minnesota waived its right to respond on August 31. The petition was distributed for the Court’s long conference of September 28, 2026, the conference at which the justices dispose of the large stack of petitions that accumulated over the summer. On October 5, the order list recorded a single line: petition denied.
Two sets of amici supported the petition. On September 15, the Second Amendment Foundation, the National Rifle Association, the California Rifle & Pistol Association, the Second Amendment Law Center, the Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus, and the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms filed a joint brief. On September 22, Huang Tiange and others, through counsel including Corey J. Biazzo, filed a second brief. Both asked the Court to grant review. Neither was enough to move four justices.
What the Eighth Circuit Held
The Eighth Circuit applied the framework of New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1 (2022). Bruen asks first whether the Second Amendment’s plain text covers the conduct at issue. If it does, the government must justify its regulation by showing consistency with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.
The panel accepted that publicly carrying a firearm in Minnesota is conduct covered by the text. It then separated that conduct from the statute Johnson had chosen to attack. In the court’s view, public carry is regulated by the permitting requirement in section 624.714, subdivision 1a, not by the reciprocity provision standing alone. Johnson, the opinion stressed, repeatedly conceded that Minnesota’s shall-issue permitting regime does not itself violate the Second Amendment. The panel expressly declined to decide whether that concession was correct. It treated the concession as binding for this case.
From that premise, the reciprocity statute looked to the court like an exemption rather than a restriction. If Minnesota may require every nonresident to obtain a Minnesota permit, then a statute that lets some nonresidents skip that process removes a hurdle for them. It does not, on this reading, add a hurdle for everyone else. Johnson’s inability to use his Florida and Georgia permits was therefore described as the absence of a convenience, not the imposition of a new burden on arms-bearing conduct. The convenience of reciprocal recognition, Judge Grasz wrote, depends on interstate comity, not the Second Amendment.
The panel leaned on an analogy to professional licensing. States, it noted, are under no general obligation to recognize another state’s license to practice a profession, because such licenses are not extraterritorial. The opinion cited Hawkins v. Moss, 503 F.2d 1171 (4th Cir. 1974), for that proposition. Johnson also raised a void-for-vagueness argument for the first time on appeal. The court treated it as waived and, in the alternative, as meritless, because the reciprocity provision imposes no penal sanction of its own.
The holding is narrow in form and broad in effect. Formally, the Eighth Circuit did not uphold a may-issue scheme, did not reject Bruen, and did not decide the constitutionality of shall-issue permitting. Practically, it approved a system in which a state may ignore a stack of valid permits and insist on its own, so long as the plaintiff has conceded that the home-state process is constitutional and so long as the court is willing to treat non-recognition as legally distinct from the carry ban that non-recognition enforces.
The Questions the Petition Asked
The petition framed two questions. First, whether Americans must obtain a firearm license from each state to exercise their Second Amendment rights across the Nation. Second, whether state reciprocity statutes that do not recognize firearm licenses issued by all other states are valid under Bruen.
The petition’s core charge was that the Eighth Circuit had confined the right to the borders of the state that issued the permit. An ordinary citizen, it argued, can prove his eligibility through one state’s licensing process and still be told by the next state to prove it again before he may exercise what Bruen called the constitutional right to bear arms in public for self-defense. No other enumerated right, the petition said, works that way.
That framing matters. Heller recognized an individual right. McDonald held that the right is fundamental and applies to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment. Bruen held that the right extends outside the home and rejected interest-balancing tests that let judges decide how much of the right is convenient to honor. A rule that the right is real in Georgia, real in Florida, and suspended in Minnesota unless a third license is obtained is in tension with the idea of a national constitutional guarantee. It is also in tension with ordinary life. Truckers, travelers, people who live near state lines, and anyone whose work crosses jurisdictions cannot treat the right as something they exercise only inside the state that printed their card.
The amici pressed the same point in practical numbers. The Second Amendment Foundation brief noted that one couple documented more than $12,800 in fees to assemble permits covering forty-six states and the District of Columbia. It also noted that licensed carriers are, as a class, overwhelmingly law-abiding: Florida has revoked only about 0.36 percent of more than 6.6 million permits issued since 1987. The argument was not that every state must adopt constitutional carry. It was that a shall-issue regime, even if a state may impose one on its own residents, does not authorize that state to ignore every other state’s determination that a person is eligible to carry.
What a Cert Denial Does and Does Not Do
A denial of certiorari affirms nothing. It does not adopt the Eighth Circuit’s reasoning. It does not create national precedent. Lower courts outside the Eighth Circuit remain free to reject the comity theory. Courts inside the Eighth Circuit remain bound by the panel’s opinion unless the circuit rehears the issue en banc or the Supreme Court later takes a related case.
Ryan Morrison of the Liberty Justice Center put the point directly after the order. A denial of certiorari is not a decision on the merits, he said, and the question at the heart of the case remains open: whether a law-abiding American forfeits his Second Amendment right to self-defense simply by crossing a state line. Johnson came forward because he cannot lawfully protect himself while driving through Minnesota. Morrison noted that he is far from alone, given the fifteen states whose permits Minnesota declines to recognize, and said the question will reach the Court in time.
That is the correct legal reading of an unexplained denial. It is also cold comfort to the person who has to plan a route this month. Inside Minnesota, and inside the Eighth Circuit, the panel’s rule is the law until something displaces it. A trucker with Florida and Georgia permits still has to unload and lock the firearm, or obtain a Minnesota permit, or risk prosecution. The denial settles the status of this judgment. It does not settle the Constitution.
Several features of the case help explain why four justices may have passed. Johnson’s concession that Minnesota’s shall-issue process is constitutional gave the Eighth Circuit a clean way to stop at Bruen step one. A future plaintiff who challenges the nonresident permitting burden itself, rather than reciprocity “standing alone,” would present a different record. Minnesota’s waiver of a response meant the Court did not have a fully adversarial briefing on the petition. The case was also set for the long conference, where the volume of petitions is highest and the rate of grants is not. None of those features makes the underlying problem small. They do make this petition a harder grant.
The Patchwork the Denial Leaves in Place
Reciprocity in the United States is an accident of state statutes, not a constitutional rule. Some states recognize every other state’s permit. Some recognize permits only from states they deem substantially similar. Some recognize almost none. A few have moved to permitless carry for eligible adults, which reduces the problem for residents and for visitors who qualify under the same rules. The traveler’s right still depends on the map.
The cost is not abstract. A nonresident permit can require an in-person appearance at a sheriff’s office, a separate training course, fingerprints, and fees, even when the applicant already holds a permit from a shall-issue state. For a long-haul driver, multiplying that process by every non-recognizing state on a national route is not a minor administrative preference. The SAF figures on multi-state fee stacks describe a right that is, in practice, rationed by time and money. Bruen warned against licensing regimes that operate as abusive denials by delay or burden. A system that demands a new license at each border raises the same concern in geographic form.
The professional-license analogy the Eighth Circuit used is the weakest part of the opinion, and it is the part a later case will have to confront. A license to practice medicine or law is a state-created privilege to engage in a regulated occupation. The Second Amendment is not a state-created privilege. It is a pre-existing right that the Constitution forbids government to infringe. States may, within historical limits, condition the manner of carrying on objective criteria. They do not, by that power, convert the right into a license whose recognition is a matter of grace between sovereigns. Comity is how states treat one another’s policy choices. It is not how the Fourteenth Amendment treats a fundamental right.
The Rest of the October 5 Order List
Johnson was not the only firearms case turned away. The Duke Center for Firearms Law counted dozens of firearms-related denials on the same order list, most of them challenges to the federal felon-in-possession ban, 18 U.S.C. section 922(g)(1), or to the unlawful-user ban in section 922(g)(3). Those denials, coming after United States v. Rahimi and United States v. Hemani, suggest the Court is not eager to reopen the federal prohibited-person statutes on the records currently arriving. Johnson sits in a different category. It is a civil challenge to a state’s treatment of out-of-state permits, not a criminal appeal by a prohibited person.
Other Second Amendment disputes remain on the docket. Duncan v. Bonta, the long-running challenge to California’s ban on magazines holding more than ten rounds, has been conferenced repeatedly without a recorded disposition, a delay that itself has become part of the story. Waiting-period cases have produced a split between circuits. Interstate-carry litigation is not exhausted by this one denial. A case that challenges the nonresident process directly, that refuses to concede the constitutionality of serial permitting, and that comes out of a circuit willing to apply Bruen’s historical test to the burden would look different from Johnson.
What the Denial Means for the Right to Travel Armed
The Constitution does not contain a firearm-reciprocity clause. It contains a right to keep and bear arms, made applicable to the states, and a right to travel. Johnson asked the Court to say that the first of those rights does not have to be repurchased at every border. The Court declined to say that, and it declined to say the opposite.
For advocates, the useful distinction is between this judgment and the next case. The Eighth Circuit’s theory, that non-recognition regulates nothing because the real regulation is the permit requirement the plaintiff conceded, is a theory other courts can reject. It treats the right as fully honored once a person may apply for a local license, no matter how many local licenses the person’s ordinary life would require. That is a thin account of a right Bruen described as belonging to ordinary, law-abiding citizens in public. It is also an account the Supreme Court has not adopted.
For Johnson, the order is simpler. His Florida permit and his Georgia permit still do not authorize him to carry in Minnesota. The injunction he sought will not issue. The statute he challenged remains in force. The Commissioner he sued remains free to keep Georgia and Florida off the reciprocity list. A denial without comment is the Court’s way of saying not this case, not this term. It is not the country’s way of saying the question has been answered.