2A Groups Clap Back at Massachusetts’ Gun Ban for Young Adults

A broad coalition of 2A groups including Second Amendment Foundation, Firearms Policy Coalition, National Rifle Association, Gun Owners of America, along with Gun Owners Action League and Commonwealth Second Amendment are challenging the Massachusetts law preventing adults younger than 21 from possessing or carrying handguns and ‘large capacity’ semi-automatic firearms. 

Massachusetts has asked a judge to dismiss the case at the outset, and this week the plaintiffs filed their reply brief in Escher v. Noble, arguing that the state’s ” arguments in favor of its Ban on 18-to-20-year-olds acquiring many of the most common arms in America today or carrying arms in public for their self-defense… finds no support in the history of our country.”

It is historical fact that, at the Founding or shortly thereafter, (1) federal law, as well as the laws of all thirteen states, required 18-year-old Americans to be armed with firearms of their own, (2) those weapons were the very same ones that were “in common use at the time for lawful purposes like self-defense,” and (3) there were zero laws from the period that restricted their ability to use those arms lawfully on account of their age.

Massachusettts’ argument hinges on the theory that legal adulthood Is a “malleable concept that does not define historical traditions under the Second Amendment”, along with the notion that “those under the age of 21 are prone to impulsive action and irresponsible decision making”; which the state contends is supported by the historical record. 

“The Founders’ generation shared the view that minors lacked the reason and judgment necessary to be trusted with legal rights.” Thomas Jefferson “considered ‘infants’ akin to ‘maniacs,’‘drunkards,’ and others who ‘cannot take care of themselves,” while John Adams wrote that minors lacked “[j]udgment” and “[w]ill.”

The state points to contract law at the time of the Founding, which generally prevented those under the age of 21 from entering into contracts (including purchasing goods like firearms) because of their tender age. The plaintiffs argue that even if that was the case (and they don’t concede that the state is right), “they could have firearms that were given to them by their parents, since the voidability rule was merely concerned with ability to contract, not the actual mechanics of firearm ownership.”

We know for a fact that there were males younger than 21 serving in the militia, as well as the Continental Army, and the state can point to no laws that prohibited under-21s from possessing or carrying firearms. As for what Adams wrote about minors lacking judgment and will, he also sent his son John Quincy off to Russia at age 15 to serve as the secretary to the American ambassador, which suggests that Adams’ views weren’t as set in stone as the state would like .

Regardless of how 18-to-20-year-olds were treated under contract law in 1791, today they are considered legal adults fully vested in all of their constitutionally protected rights… except the right to keep and bear arms. And just as the Second Amendment protects arms that weren’t in existence at the time of the Founding, it should also protect the right to keep and carry them for people who weren’t considered full-grown adults back then, but are today. 

The Supreme Court is currently holding on to almost a half-dozen cases dealing with this issue, which are likely to be remanded back to lower courts after the justices issue their opinions in Wolford v. Lopez and U.S. v. Hemani later this year. At the very least the district court should hold on to Escher v. Noble until then. Dismissing it now when SCOTUS has indicated that these challenges have legal merit would be a mistake, but it wouldn’t be the first one the lower courts have made when it comes to the scope of our Second Amendment rights. 

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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