Georgia Supreme Court Upholds Carry Ban for Adults Under 21

If you’re an adult, one would imagine you should be old enough to do adult things. Sure, there are age limits built into the Constitution for holding certain federal offices, but beyond that? Well, it doesn’t matter what we imagine because there are age limits and always will be, unfortunately, at least for some things.

But there shouldn’t be for constitutionally protected rights, such as the right to keep and bear arms.

In Georgia, though, not only do we have the federal prohibition on adults under 21 buying handguns, we also restrict those same folks from carrying a gun. It’s the big flaw in our constitutional carry law.

Unfortunately, the Georgia Supreme Court has decided it’s constitutional to have it.

The Georgia Supreme Court on Wednesday unanimously upheld a state law prohibiting adults under 21 from possessing or carrying handguns in public.

The court ruled against 20-year-old Thomas Stephens, who, along with gun rights advocacy group Georgia 2nd Amendment, sued the state to overturn the law after a probate court denied him a weapons carry license.

In its ruling, the Supreme Court upheld the trial court’s decision in the case and rejected Stephens’ “quite narrow” challenge.

The justices decided the law does not violate Article I, Section I, Paragraph VIII of the Georgia Constitution, which guarantees the right to bear arms but specifies the General Assembly can regulate how those firearms are carried.

Stephens had argued the court should overturn its rulings in past cases related to Paragraph VIII, “holding that the Georgia right to keep and bear arms is subject only to a ‘reasonable exercise of police power’ test.”

The court noted that Stephens did not allege the law violates the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, but that he instead asked the court to “reconsider and overrule” over a century of precedent related to Paragraph VIII by relying on recent federal court rulings.

So saying it’s constitutional isn’t saying it’s constitutional.

It might be within the state’s constitution, but that means it’s also within state jurisprudence on the law. That means the court didn’t have to consider Bruen or anything of the sort.

I’m not going to say Stephens and GA2A screwed up here, because I’m not precisely certain what they were going for, but the door is still opened for further challenge, particularly under the Second Amendment. Whether that’s by design or not is unclear, but the truth is that it’s not an issue either way, tactically speaking. 

Of course, it’s unlikely Stephens will retain standing for a US Supreme Court challenge, but there are plenty of others who would likely be glad to step in for the cause.

The truth of the matter is, though, that the court should have recognized that any previous precedent on the subject was wrong. Yes, the state constitution says that the general assembly has the authority to regulate how guns are carried, but that all adults have the right to keep and bear arms. For example, Georgia requires all carry guns to be in a holster. This falls into how guns are carried, and it meets this standard just fine with minimal treading on the right to carry in and of itself. 

So yeah, my state supreme court botched it, and since judges are elected, I will most definitely be making my displeasure known at the ballot box, but this could have been much worse.