Another Important Judicial Victory for 2nd Amendment Rights

In one sense, it’s sad commentary that it required a federal appellate court to confirm that the Bill of Rights protects twenty-year-old law-abiding citizens just as it does American adults of other ages.  

That idea seemed foreign to increasingly desperate gun control advocates and the Biden administration, which fought to prevent adults under age twenty-one from purchasing perfectly legal firearms.  

As if American adults between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one don’t possess the natural right of self-defense?  

Fortunately, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals took a very different view in a new decision applying the Second Amendment’s individual right to keep and bear arms to law-abiding American adults under the age of twenty-one.  It marks just the latest judicial branch victory for originalism and those who believe that constitutional protections and the Bill of Rights mean what they explicitly say.  

At issue was a federal statute and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) regulation prohibiting federal firearms licensees from selling or delivering handguns to adults under the age of twenty-one.  

A 2012 ruling from the Fifth Circuit upheld those restrictions, which the Biden administration considered the end of the matter.  

That decision, however, preceded the seminal New York Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen decision from the United States Supreme Court.  In that case, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the majority in ruling that the government must justify any restriction on the right to keep and bear arms “by demonstrating that it is consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”  

Incredibly, the Biden administration attorneys asked the court to believe that “eighteen-to-twenty-year-olds are not among ‘the people’ protected by the right” to keep and bear arms.  

In support of that curious claim, the Biden administration pointed out “that legislatures have long established minimum age requirements for various activities” like purchasing alcoholic beverages.  The court, however, highlighted how constitutional text weighed heavily in the opposite logical direction:  

There are no age or maturity restrictions in the plain text of the Amendment, as there are in other constitutional provisions (members of the House of Representatives must be at least 25 years old).  This suggests that the Second Amendment lacks a minimum age requirement.  Moreover, in the unamended Constitution and Bill of Rights, the phrase “right of the people” appears in the First Amendment’s Assembly-and-Petition Clause, the Fourth Amendment’s Search-and-Seizure Clause, and the Ninth Amendment.  All of these references confer “individual rights” and undoubtedly protect eighteen-to-twenty-year-olds as much as twenty-one-year-olds.  In fact, with modifications, the rights they confer extend to younger voters.  (Emphasis added.)  

“Because the Second Amendment’s plain text covers the conduct at issue,” the court proceeded, “the Constitution presumptively protects the conduct.”  

Accordingly, the court addressed and answered the pivotal question of whether prohibiting law-abiding adults over the age of eighteen “is consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”  On that question, the historical record since ratification of the Bill of Rights itself was clear:  

[T]he 1792 Militia Act, passed shortly after the Second Amendment was ratified, required eighteen-year-olds to enroll in the militia, and militia members were required to furnish their own weapons.  Of course, “[t]he right to keep and bear arms was not coextensive with militia service,” however, “[g]un ownership was necessary for militia service;  militia service wasn’t necessary for gun ownership.”  Certainly, eighteen-year-olds “must have been allowed to ‘keep’ firearms for personal use,” and “were within the ‘core’ rights-holders at the founding.”  To satisfy its burden that banning eighteen-to-twenty-year-olds from purchasing handguns is consistent with our Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation, the government must overcome this clear and germane evidence that eighteen-to-twenty-year-olds enjoyed the same Second Amendment rights as their twenty-one-year-old peers at the founding.  

In the most pivotal segment of the court’s opinion, it held that the Biden administration had failed to meet that heavy burden.  “The federal government,” it held, “has presented scant evidence that eighteen-to-twenty-year-olds’ firearm rights during the founding era were restricted in a similar manner to the contemporary federal handgun purchase ban.”  

Demonstrating the mainstream media’s utter inability to approach Second Amendment rights in an intelligent and honest manner, the New York Times ran a headline that the ruling opened the door to handgun possession by “teenagers.”  It apparently shocks some that the Bill of Rights actually means what it explicitly says.  

In any event, this marks another victory for individual freedom via a judicial system increasingly populated by strict constructionists.  

Unable to dismiss the Second Amendment as a relic or a privilege limited to state governments, opponents have tried to chip away at the individual right to keep and bear arms through such measures as prohibiting handgun purchases by adults under twenty-one.  

Thanks to the Fifth Circuit, those efforts suffered yet another resounding defeat.

Timothy H. Lee is Senior Vice President of legal and public affairs at the Center for Individual Freedom.

Reprinted with Permission from CFIF.org – By Timothy H. Lee

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.