We've spent most of this site on SB25-003. It's a different, older Colorado gun law that just had oral arguments in federal court this week — and if you've been asking "what's the status of the waiting period," this is the case that answers it.
The law in question
HB23-1219 took effect October 1, 2023. It generally prevents delivery until the later of two events: three days after a licensed dealer initiates the required background check, or approval of the transfer after the required background check is completed. The bill's stated purpose is to delay immediate access in an effort to prevent impulsive firearm violence. This is separate from SB25-003's eligibility cards and the specified-semiautomatic-firearm list; it applies to firearm purchases generally, subject to statutory exceptions.
The lawsuit's long road
Rocky Mountain Gun Owners, joined by firearms instructor Alicia Garcia, sued the same day the law took effect. You'll see this case cited two different ways — RMGO v. Polis and Garcia v. Polis — depending on the source; it's the same case, District of Colorado docket 1:23-cv-02563, in front of Judge John L. Kane.
The early rounds went against the plaintiffs. A temporary restraining order was denied within days, and Judge Kane denied a preliminary injunction on November 13, 2023. RMGO appealed that denial to the Tenth Circuit, where the case sat through 2024 — including supplemental briefing after the Supreme Court's Rahimi decision — before jurisdiction returned to the district court without a ruling on the underlying constitutional question. From there, the case proceeded through discovery, and by May 2025 both sides had filed cross-motions for summary judgment, each asking the court to decide the whole case in their favor without a trial. Briefing on those motions wrapped up in July 2025. Then, in August 2025, something changed the entire posture of the case.
Why a New Mexico ruling matters here
On August 19, 2025, the Tenth Circuit—the same appeals court that sits over Colorado—ruled in Ortega v. Grisham, 148 F.4th 1134 (10th Cir. 2025), that the plaintiffs were likely to succeed in their challenge to New Mexico's seven-day firearm waiting period. The court's reasoning was direct: the right to keep and bear arms necessarily includes the right to acquire arms, waiting periods delay that acquisition without any comparable historical tradition to justify them, and New Mexico's "it's just a condition on a commercial sale" defense didn't hold up — as the court put it, "a seven-day waiting period is not a 'condition' on a sale any more than the price of a firearm is. The sale happens regardless, and the waiting period is just an artificial delay on possession." New Mexico asked the full Tenth Circuit to rehear the case; that request was denied on December 22, 2025, leaving the panel's ruling in place as binding circuit precedent.
RMGO's attorneys filed notice of that ruling in the Colorado case the day after it came down. The two waiting-period mechanisms are close to identical in how they work — both delay physical transfer of a firearm that has already cleared a background check, for a fixed number of days, in the name of a "cooling off" period. If Ortega's reasoning controls, Colorado's law is sitting in roughly the same constitutional position New Mexico's was.
The wrinkle the state is leaning on
Colorado isn't without an argument, and it comes from the Tenth Circuit itself. A year before Ortega, the same appeals court decided Rocky Mountain Gun Owners v. Polis, No. 23-1251 (10th Cir. Nov. 5, 2024) — a different RMGO suit — and upheld Colorado's law setting 21 as the minimum age to buy a gun, reasoning that age-based purchase conditions are the kind of "presumptively lawful condition or qualification on commercial sale" that survives Second Amendment scrutiny even after Bruen.
That sounds like it could save the waiting period too, and the Ortega panel clearly saw that argument coming — because Ortega addresses it directly, distinguishing the two rather than ignoring the tension. The Ortega opinion notes that the earlier RMGO decision "explicitly declined to define the full scope of concomitant rights, if any, to 'keep and bear,'" and criticizes reading it as broadly immunizing any law that merely "regulates... selling and purchasing" firearms, calling that a "shortcut analysis" that "could prop up laws that lay heavy burdens on the rights of ordinary citizens." In the Ortega panel's own words: "In any event, RMGO did not grapple with the full scope of arguments defining conditions and qualifications that we face here, and declined to reach the issues that are most pertinent in this case. Our decision today accords with RMGO." Whether Judge Kane reads those two precedents the same way the Ortega panel did is now the whole ballgame.
Where things stand right now
Oral arguments on the cross-motions for summary judgment were held on August 24, 2026, nearly a year after Ortega came down. Some outlets covering the hearing noted that Judge Kane circulated an unusually detailed argument agenda beforehand, which at least one gun-rights commentator read as the judge searching for a way to justify upholding the law despite Ortega. We'd treat that as speculation about a judge's mindset from people rooting for a particular outcome, not a confirmed signal — agendas get published for all kinds of reasons, and reading tea leaves from one is exactly the kind of thing that's easy to get wrong in either direction. What's actually true is simpler: no ruling has been issued yet, and this is a live, fully-briefed case in front of a judge who now has to reconcile two Tenth Circuit precedents that don't obviously point the same direction.
Bottom line
The three-day waiting period remains in effect in Colorado today — nothing about the litigation has paused or blocked it. But this is no longer an open question sitting quietly in discovery; it's a fully briefed case that has had its hearing, with the plaintiffs pointing to a favorable circuit-court decision they did not have when this suit was filed. We don't know how Judge Kane will rule or when. We'll cover it when he does. In the meantime, this is a separate legal track from Del Toro v. Polis, the case challenging SB25-003's eligibility-card requirement — two different Colorado statutes, two different lawsuits, moving on two different timelines.
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