Federal Judge Upholds Connecticut’s Carry Ban for Young Adults

The circuit court split over young adults and their Second Amendment rights could deepen now that a federal judge in Connecticut has upheld the state and federal laws that prevent adults under the age of 21 from purchasing, possessing, and carrying a handgun. 

Zachary Succow and Samuel Towne, along with Connecticut Citizens Defense League and Second Amendment Foundation, filed their complaint against Attorney General Todd Blanche and a host of Connecticut officials last May, and Judge Sarala V. Nagala held a two-day bench trial, followed by post-trial briefing and oral argument earlier this year. 

After hearing from all parties, Nagala concluded that there is a national tradition of barring minors from purchasing and possessing handguns. The problem with that, of course, is that a 20-year-old today isn’t considered a minor, even if that might have been the case in the past. 

Nagala also approvingly cited several 19th century laws that prohibited everyone from carrying a concealed firearm. 

Several states passed laws that prohibited the carrying andconcealment of pistols and revolvers by anyone, both over and under the age of twenty-one. An 1873 Kentucky state law prohibited “any person” from carrying “concealed a deadly weapon upon or about his person other than an ordinary pocket knife,” subjecting violators to a fine and up to thirty days in county jail for a violation. An 1879 Missouri law prohibited any person from “carry[ing] concealed, upon or about his person, any deadly or dangerous weapon,” and subjected violators to a monetary fine and up to six months in a county jail. An 1881 Delaware state law with virtuallyt he exact same language as the Kentucky law prohibited “any person” from “carry[ing] concealed a deadly weapon upon or about his person other than an ordinary pocket knife,” and subjected violators to a monetary fine and up to thirty days in a county jail. Likewise, an 1882 West Virginia state law prohibited any person to “carry about his person any revolver or other pistol . . . or any other dangerous or deadly weapon of like kind or character,” and subjected violators to a monetary fine and time in jail. Finally, Washington, D.C. enacted a similar law in 1892, applying to “deadly or dangerous weapons, such as daggers, air-guns, pistols . . .” and prohibiting anyone in the District from having them “concealed about their person.” 

All of these laws restrict not only the ability of those under twenty-one to possess and carry handguns, but are even more restrictive than the Connecticut Framework in that they eliminate the ability of anyone at all to do so. Accordingly, while these laws are generally applicable, they also functioned to “protect minors, by restricting their access to firearms and other dangerous weapons, and to protect society from minors’ consequent misdeeds,” and therefore share, at least in part, the same “why” as the Connecticut Framework.

That’s a real stretch. The “how” and “why” of laws banning the general practice of carrying concealed go far beyond laws that specifically banned minors from purchasing or possessing handguns. And laws that banned minors from accessing handguns cannot be analogous to laws that ban young adults from purchasing or possessing pistols, even if the “why” may be similar. 

Nagala was aware that other circuits have reached different conclusions about the Second Amendment rights of adults under the age of 21. When it comes to the federal law barring under-21s from purchasing handguns through an FFL, Nagala argued that the Fifth Circuit ruled the law unconstitutional without considering whether the “infancy doctrine, and the inability of minors to contract for non-necessary goods, could serve as a historical analogue for the Federal Framework.” Once again, the key word there is “minors,” and it is unquestionably true that today adults 18 and older are part of the political community, and therefore are part of the people who have the right to keep and bear arms. 

On the issue of under-21s’ carrying, Nagala opined that unlike the Second Circuit (which has jurisdiction over Connecticut), the Third and Eighth Circuits do not put much, if any, stock in Reconstruction-era laws. 

This is not the case in the Second Circuit, where both the Founding and Reconstruction eras, “and the adjacent and intervening periods,” present “fertile ground” for the court’s analysis.

This is an area where the Second Circuit is simply wrong. While the Supreme Court hasn’t definitively stated how much weight, if any, should be given to laws adopted around the time the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, it has said nothing at all to indicate that laws adopted decades after the Second Amendment’s ratification but before the Fourteenth Amendment was added to the Constitution can serve as meaningful analogues. Quite the opposite. The Court held in Bruen that “Constitutional rights are enshrined with the scope they were understood to have when the people adopted them,” which would be 1791 in the case of the Second Amendment. 

The Court also characterized laws adopted in the late 1800s as “long after” 1791, and therefore less important than earlier laws. And importantly, the decision also explicitly states that “To the extent later history contradicts what the text says, the text controls,” and “As we recognized in Heller itself, because post-Civil War discussions of the right to keep and bear arms ‘took place 75 years after the ratification of the Second Amendment, they do not provide as much insight into its original meaning as earlier sources.’”

The Second Circuit has willfully ignored those statements, and Nagala is relying on that willful ignorance to uphold Connecticut’s ban on young adults possessing and carrying the most common tool for self-defense today. 

Unless the Second Circuit has a change of heart and starts faithfully applying the Bruen decision, I think it’s likely going to uphold Nagala’s ruling on appeal. That, in turn, will deepen the conflict between the various appellate courts on the issue of when our right to keep and bear arms kicks in… and will hopefully prod the Supreme Court to finally provide a concrete answer. 

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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