In a new ruling last week, U.S. Federal District Court Judge Robert Payne in Richmond, Virginia, decided that dealers must be allowed to sell handguns to young adults under 21, including 18 to 20-year-olds. Judge Payne ruled that the current law banning firearms dealers from selling to young adults under 21 violates the Second Amendment, making this law unconstitutional.
This new ruling echoes the landmark Supreme Court decision in 2022 that revamped the prior ruling that courts were mandated to use to evaluate and test any challenges to firearm restrictions. The Supreme Court decided in that historic decision that judges do not have to consider whether the law “serves public interest,” including strengthening public safety.
The Supreme Court decision also said that any states that want to uphold a gun restriction must prove via historical facts that the new proposed laws would be consistent with the “historical tradition of firearm regulation” in the U.S.
In an older existing law, the Gun Control Act of 1968, people over 18 years old could buy shotguns and rifles. However, this Act did not include handguns, which could only be purchased by adults 21 years old or older. The new ruling includes handguns for 18-year-olds and older.
Judge Payne wrote that he finds many U.S. citizens’ rights and responsibilities activate at the age of eighteen, including the right to vote, the right to serve on a federal jury, and the right to enlist in the military without parental permission. To Judge Payne, the right to own legally purchased firearms is also a right that should be included for adults as young as eighteen years of age.
In his decision, he wrote, “If the Court were to exclude 18-to-20-year-olds from the Second Amendment’s protection, it would impose limitations on the Second Amendment that do not exist with other constitutional guarantees. Because the statutes and regulations in question are not consistent with our Nation’s history and tradition, they, therefore, cannot stand.”
Judge Payne noted that his ruling specifically followed the 2022 Supreme Court’s decision, saying that the highest court in the land instructed the government that if they did not show “any evidence of age-based restrictions on the purchase or sale of firearms from the colonial era, Founding or Early Republic,” they must overturn restrictive gun laws.
Judge Payne’s 71-page ruling follows the new pattern of looser gun laws being passed across the U.S. after the Supreme Court ruling, including in states such as Minnesota and Texas. A federal judge in Minnesota based his decision in overturning a state law banning the sale of handguns to 18 to 20-year-olds upon the Supreme Court decision. In Texas, another judge overturned a law that placed age restrictions for young adults, also based upon the Supreme Court decision.
Beyond the changes to age-based firearm restrictions in American law, led by the Supreme Court’s decision cited above, numerous states with laws created to make firearm ownership illegal to defendants under a federal indictment or domestic abusers, have declared those laws unconstitutional.
The CDC reports that in 2021, the most updated year for gun death data, 48,830 Americans died from gun-related injuries. These 48,830 gun-caused deaths in 2021 show a 23% increase since 2019.
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