Professor Calls Young Adults Exercising Second Amendment Rights ‘Utter Madness’

The anti-gun crowd is melting down over the Fifth Circuit’s recent decision striking down the federal ban on young adults purchasing handguns from licensed gun dealers. At Slate, columnist and political science professor Austin Sarat calls the appellate court’s opinion “utter madness”, and claims that recognizing young adults have the same right to keep and bear arms as their more seasoned counterparts “is an open invitation to the court to take another step toward making gun ownership a constitutionally preferred right.”

Here’s a newsflash for Sarat: gun ownership is a constitutionally preferred right, just like every other enumerated right contained within the Constitution. And contrary to Sarat’s cantankerous take on the Fifth Circuit’s decision, there’s nothing in the text or history of the right to keep and bear arms to suggest that voting-age adults should be denied that right or have it curtailed in any way. 

Everytown for Gun Safety, an advocacy group for gun regulation, reports that “18- to 20-year-olds commit gun homicides at triple the rate of adults 21 and older.” And research by professor James Fox, noted in the Politifact article, indicates that “18-to-20-year-olds comprise 4% of the U.S. population, but commit 17% of gun homicides.”

Other studies have found that 18-to-20-year-olds committed fatal shootings at “three times the rate of 16-year-olds” and nearly “three times the rate of a person in their 30s.”

What Justice Anthony Kennedy said in 2005 about why the juvenile death penalty was unconstitutional may help explain why gun violence is so high among young people. “As any parent knows,” Kennedy wrote, “and as the scientific and sociological studies respondent and his amici cite tend to confirm, ‘[a] lack of maturity and an underdeveloped sense of responsibility are found in youth more often than in adults and are more understandable among the young. These qualities often result in impetuous and ill-considered actions and decisions.’ ”

“Adolescents,” Kennedy continued, “are overrepresented statistically in virtually every category of reckless behavior.”

In a different world, with a more rational approach to guns and gun rights, such findings would provide the kind of “permissible reason” that the 5^th Circuit discounts. Indeed, even Justice Antonin Scalia, author of the Supreme Court’s landmark gun rights decision District of Columbia v. Heller, likely would have agreed with such an approach.

It’s true that rates of violent crime (not just “gun violence”) are higher among young adults than those in their 30s, 40s, or 50s. That alone, however, isn’t justification to deny every 18-to-20-year-old the ability to protect themselves with a firearm. According to National Highway Traffic Safety Administration statistics, drivers between the ages of 16 and 24 were responsible for almost 25% of car accidents in 2021, but no one (including Sarat) is demanding that the age to drive be raised to 25. We don’t let the actions of a few dictate rights for the rest of us. Yes, young adults may be responsible for an outsized portion of violent crime, but the vast majority of adults under-21 are still responsible, law-abiding citizens, and they shouldn’t be deprived of their Second Amendment rights just because of the actions of a small percentage of their cohorts. 

Firearm-related suicide, the most common form of “gun violence”, is far more common among older Americans. Does Sarat believe that would be a “permissible reason” to deny adults over the age of 50 or 60 (or maybe just men over the age of 50) access to their Second Amendment rights? If not, why? What’s the difference? 

At the time the Second Amendment was written, the age of majority was generally held to be 21. These days it’s 18, and there’s no valid argument in favor of prohibiting a member of the political community from exercising any enumerated right simply because they’re a young adult. 

Sarat complains that if the Fifth Circuit decision stands, “people under the age of 21 will still not be able legally to buy alcohol anywhere in this country. But they will be able to buy handguns.” That’s more of an argument in favor of lowering the drinking age, frankly, than keeping the status quo in place for gun purchases. 

There’s nothing in federal law prohibiting 18-year-olds from legally possessing a gun, or purchasing one in a private sale. It’s only retail sales of handguns that are forbidden, and the Fifth Circuit was right to reject that legal anomaly in favor of a common sense decision that respects the text of the Second Amendment and our national tradition of gun ownership. The Fifth Circuit’s decision isn’t “utter madness”, but it does treat the right to keep and bear arms as the fundamental right that it is… and that’s enough to drive the anti-gunners crazy.