Federal law allows for adults under the age of 21 to possess handguns. It allows for those same adults to both possess and purchase rifles and shotguns at retail. But when it comes to purchasing handguns from an FFL, existing federal law says you must be 21… and now the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that’s a violation of our right to keep and bear arms.
Today’s decision in Reese v. ATF is a big win, not only for young adults but for the 2A groups who were a part of the litigation. The Firearms Policy Coalition, Second Amendment Foundation, and Louisiana Shooting Association joined individiual plaintiffs Caleb Reese and Emily Naquin in challenging the current statute, which had previously been upheld by the Fifth Circuit. In the opinion released today, however, a three-judge panel on the Fifth Circuit concluded that under the Supreme Court’s guidance in both Bruen and Rahimi, the earlier decision is untenable and “inconsistent with the Second Amendment”.
The threshold textual question is not whether the laws and regulations impose reasonable or historically grounded limitations, but whether the Second Amendment “covers” the conduct (commercial purchases) to begin with. Because constitutional rights impliedly protect corollary acts necessary to their exercise, we hold that it does. To suggest otherwise proposes a world where citizens’ constitutional right to “keep and bear arms” excludes the most prevalent, accessible, and safe market used to exercise the right. The baleful implications of limiting the right at the outset by means of narrowing regulations not implied in the text are obvious; step by step, other limitations on sales could easily displace the right altogether.
More specifically, the Fifth Circuit rejected the Biden administration’s argument that adults under the age of 21 are not part of “the people” who possess the right to keep and bear arms.
There are no age or maturity restrictions in the plain text of the Amendment, as there are in other constitutional provisions. See, e.g., U.S. Const. art. I, § 2, cl. 2 (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, th ephrase “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 minors.
The Fifth Circuit went on to say that “elsewhere in the Constitution, “the people” refers to all Americans collectively. Nowhere, however, does the Constitution limit the exercise of a fundamental right solely to those over the age of 21.
In order to uphold the law in question, the federal government had to show that this modern restriction comports not only with the text of the Second Amendment, but the national tradition of gun ownership. Instead, the Fifth Circuit concluded that Biden’s DOJ “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”. Given the paucity of historic regulations prohibiting young adults from keeping, bearing, or purchasing arms, the Fifth Circuit rightfully concluded that the modern law is an infringement on that fundamental right.
Hopefully this marks the end of the Reese case. It’s now up to the Trump administration to decide whether to appeal the Fifth Circuit’s decision to the U.S. Supreme Court or to let the decision stand unopposed. Trump has said he won’t lay a finger on our Second Amendment rights, and this might be the first test of that promise. Pam Bondi, who’s Trump’s pick for Attorney General, previously defended Florida’s ban on retail gun sales to under-21s in her role as the state’s Attorney General, but if Trump is true to his word he’ll tell the DOJ to stand down and allow today’s decision to stand on its own.
Read the full article here
