Hmm: Appellate Court Makes Surprise Move in Under-21 Lawsuit

The Supreme Court generally doesn’t like to see appellate courts split on any given issue, since it can result in federal law being enforced in some parts of the country while being put on hold in other states. Still, SCOTUS left a circuit court split in place when it denied cert to five cases dealing with the right to acquire and the right to carry firearms by adults under the age of 21 at its final conference of last term. 

The Fifth Circuit, for instance, has held that 18-to-20-year olds have the right to purchase handguns, even though federal law says otherwise. The Eleventh Circuit, on the other hand, has held that under-21s do not have the right to purchase any firearm at all in a retail sale. 

The Eleventh Circuit’s decision stems from a case called NRA v. Glass, which was one of the five age-based cases turned away by SCOTUS at the end of last term. The lawsuit challenged Florida’s law prohibiting the commercial sale of firearms to adults under the age of 21, which the appellate court deemed analogous to 18th century provisions that barred those under the age of 21 from entering into contracts. 

In a surprising move, however, the Eleventh Circuit has now revived a lawsuit challenging the state of Georgia’s ban on adults under the age of 21 from carrying a handgun for self-defense. 

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— GA2A (@GA2Aorg) July 27, 2026

The Third and Eighth Circuits have previously determined that under-21s do have the right to bear arms, and though the Eleventh Circuit declined to reach that conclusion in Georgia Second Amendment, Inc., et al v. Governor of Georgia, et al, it did overturn the district court’s dismissal of the lawsuit and ordered the court to reconsider its decision in light of what the appellate court held in NRA v. Glass as well as what the Supreme Court said in Wolford. 

In its per curium opinion reviving the Georgia lawsuit, the Eleventh Circuit noted that while it upheld the ban on commercial sales of firearms to adults younger than 21, it preserved “access to firearms with parental consent.” Then it turned its attention to Wolford.

In Wolford, the Supreme Court held that a Hawaii statute  banning concealed carry permit holders from carrying handguns on private property open to the public without the property owner’s express authorization violated the Second Amendment. Hawaii primarily argued that its statute was constitutional because there were “analogous colonial and early state laws.” The Supreme Court disagreed. It reviewed the historical laws on which Hawaii relied and concluded that they were “vastly different” because most of them “prohibited unauthorized hunting of deer or small game on someone else’s private property.” The Court concluded that the gap  between these laws and Hawaii’s statute was “too wide” to satisfy the Second Amendment. 

When it denied the motion for a preliminary injunction and dismissed the case before us today, the district court did not have the benefit of the Supreme Court’s decision in Wolford or our en banc decision in National Rifle Association. We therefore VACATE the district court’s order denying the motion for preliminary injunction and dismissing the case and REMAND so that the district court can consider these intervening decisions in the first instance.

It seems kind of crazy to conclude that under-21s have the right to carry a handgun in self-defense, but don’t have the right to acquire one through the most common means available to adults 21 and older, but that seems to be what the Eleventh Circuit is hinting at here. The opinion goes out of its way to point out that NRA did not ban young adults from acquiring a handgun under all circumstances, which is important because the district court used NRA as the basis for rejecting Georgia Second Amendment, Inc.‘s challenge to Georgia’s carry laws.

The Eleventh Circuit appears to be suggesting that the “infancy doctrine” cannot be deployed to prohibit young adults from bearing arms, even if it can be used to stop them from purchasing a pistol at retail. That’s a positive development, but it still doesn’t address the major flaw in NRA; namely, that while 21 might have been the age of majority in 1791 when it came to entering into contracts, 18 is generally considered to be the age of majority today. An 18-year-old can get married, which is perhaps the biggest contract there is, but can also sign a contract to purchase a car or home as well as a contract spelling out the terms of their employment. The district court won’t have cause to revisit or reject NRA‘s holding, unfortunately, but I don’t see how SCOTUS can duck the circuit court split on handgun sales to under-21s much longer. 

Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.

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