When Lance Walker became one of Maine’s three federal judges, appointed in 2018 as, thus far, Donald Trump’s only nominee from Maine, he quickly established a reputation as a judicial maverick with an elegant turn of phrase.

His first notable case came when Bruce Poliquin lost his congressional seat to Jared Golden in 2018 through the nation’s first use of ranked-choice voting in a federal election — and challenged the outcome. Walker came right to the point: “I am not persuaded that the United States Constitution compels the Court to interfere with this most sacred expression of democratic will by enjoining the ballot-counting process and declaring Rep. Poliquin the victor.”

U.S. District Judge Lance Walker.

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in May 2020, Walker upheld orders by Gov. Janet Mills closing public places. He observed, “This collective crisis ought to have imposed a sense of collective humility given the long shadow cast by all that we do not know about the disease.”

Walker’s gifts with a pen were used quite differently in a Feb. 13 ruling that sided with gun organizations concerning Maine’s three-day waiting period for firearms sales that went into effect last August.

Waiting periods for all gun purchases have been enacted in 10 states, including Florida, and in New England, Vermont and Rhode Island; no waits are shorter than three days and some are as long as 10. Two more states, Maryland and New Jersey, have a one-week wait for handgun purchases, while Minnesota requires 30 days for handguns and assault weapons.

Most have been challenged in court, but until Walker’s restraining order, no judge had suggested that waiting periods were unconstitutional.

Walker seems to have no doubt that Maine’s law will ultimately be struck down, saying the Second Amendment rights for individual firearms ownership are paramount, and that “Any interpretation to the contrary requires the type of interpretive jiu-jitsu that would make Kafka blush.”

That would be Franz Kafka, the 20th century’s master of the bureaucratically absurd.

Maine’s new law was so offensive, he found, that it required an unusual order immediately blocking enforcement. To make this ruling before any evidence was presented at trial suggests that Walker believes waiting periods will become the latest evidence of the U.S. Supreme Court’s turn toward expanding gun rights.

It began in 2008 with Justice Antonin Scalia’s opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller, which struck down the capital’s ban on handgun possession and, for the first time, found an individual right to own firearms, not the collective right through the militia clause for armed defense of the state or nation.

In 2022, Justice Clarence Thomas opened the floodgates in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, striking down New York’s concealed weapons permit system. Lower courts almost immediately found all sorts of weapons restrictions — some on the books for nearly a century — unconstitutional.

But the Supreme Court made a major course correction in 2024, when in U.S. v. Rahimi, a Texas case, the court upheld a statute allowing removal of guns in domestic violence cases.

Maine has a similar law, and the same legal reasoning applies to the “red flag law” that will appear on the November ballot, allowing families to petition a judge to remove firearms. Where will the court turn next? Walker seems to know, setting aside a protective waiting period at the outset of what’s certain to be a lengthy trail of appeals, motions and rulings.

As opposed to his earlier judicial restraint, Walker is now turning to judicial activism.

One wonders. I am haunted by the death some years ago of a colleague’s son, who purchased a handgun from a local gun shop and the next day took his own life with it. For years, the father attempted to focus public attention on this tragedy, in which all the principal players knew each other — as he wondered why anyone would sell a gun to a clearly troubled young man. But there was no law, and thus no consequences.

Then, for six months, there was a law — until Walker decided it should have no effect.

The majority of deaths by firearms in Maine come from self-inflicted wounds. And as the months go on, it seems certain there will be more. No, not every death will be prevented by a waiting period, but surely some would be.

Today, some judges seem inclined to ignore the human costs of their decisions, the suffering and the anguish that comes from our uniquely permissive approach to firearms ownership and use, exacerbated by the current Supreme Court majority.

Somehow, one may still hope that Judge Walker will be proven wrong.