NRA: Fifth Circuit Decision is Going to Help in Florida Challenge

When people turn 18, they should be able to exercise the full spectrum of their constitutionally protected rights. They can speak freely, worship freely, not have the authorities just walk into their homes without a warrant, the works. Many of these rights they get when they’re younger, of course, but as adults, nothing should be off-limits to them so far as their rights go.

That includes the right to keep and bear arms.

Recently, the Fifth Circuit found that laws prohibiting legal adults under 21 from buying handguns is unconstitutional.

For the NRA, which is one of many groups challenging a similar restriction in Florida that keeps those same folks from buying long guns, that was a helpful move.

Nearly seven years after the law passed, the National Rifle Association contends that a new court ruling bolsters its constitutional challenge to a Florida measure that bars people under age 21 from buying rifles and shotguns.

The NRA on Monday filed a document at the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that cited a ruling last week by another federal appeals court in a Louisiana case. That ruling by a panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said a decades-old federal ban on selling handguns to people under 21 violates the Second Amendment.

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The NRA, in its filing Monday at the 11th Circuit, argued that the Louisiana ruling “makes clear that Florida’s ban is inconsistent with historical tradition.”

“Even more so than the federal laws banning commercial sale of handguns to young adults, Florida’s young adult ban is inconsistent with historical tradition and violates the Second Amendment,” John Parker Sweeney, an attorney for the NRA, wrote in a document known as supplemental authority.

But an attorney for Florida disputed the NRA’s arguments in a filing Tuesday, saying the Florida law is “fully consistent with the common law at the founding, which prohibited minors in most instances from purchasing firearms.” The filing drew a distinction with the 5th Circuit ruling, which it said focused heavily on firearm access and ownership by minors at the time of the nation’s founding.

Except that these aren’t minors. These are legal adults who are being prohibited from buying firearms. In Florida, that includes all firearms. The handgun prohibition was already in place due to it being a federal law, but then the long gun sales ban made it so they could buy nothing.

The courts have previously found that the right to keep and bear arms has to include the right to buy guns or else it’s meaningless, which is true. Florida prohibits that now.

The Fifth Circuit recognized the problems here and made their ruling.

Now, the Florida attorney is trying to play fast and loose with definitions, and of course, CBS News didn’t push back on that statement at all. If this is where the state of Florida is going to go on this, if this is how they’re going to defend the law from the perspective the Fifth Circuit took, they’re going to have a bad time.

Minors are prohibited from buying guns. That’s not on the cusp of change in any way, shape, or form.

But people who are 18 and older are considered adults. Unless Florida is going to change that, claiming that minors were prohibited from buying guns so this is cool is an idiotic argument to make.