Federal Court Drops Major Ruling on Handgun Sales

We shall see what becomes of this recent ruling in the grand scheme of the Bill of Rights and Originalism vs. Living Constitutionalism, which is also known as Activism.

A federal court has ruled that the ban on the sale of handguns to Americans under the age of 21 is illegal.

This from townhall.com.

For years, this was established law—Americans could own long guns at 18, but handguns at 21. This is the first ruling on this subject in the post-Bruen era:

A federal appeals court ruled Thursday that a decades-old ban on federally licensed firearms dealers selling handguns to people aged 18, 19 and 20 is unconstitutional.

In a unanimous ruling, the three-judge panel on the New Orleans-based 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals slammed the Biden administration’s attempt to argue that the handgun ban was in line with the ‘nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation’—a test for gun laws set by the Supreme Court’s landmark 2022 ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen.

[…]

Congress established Federal Firearms License Dealers and banned them from selling handguns to adults under the age of 21 in 1968, as part of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act.

The Biden Justice Department defended the ban in the case brought by a group of 18-20 year-olds with the assistance of the Firearms Policy Coalition and the Second Amendment Foundation.

The plaintiffs brought the case to the 5th Circuit in an attempt to appeal a Louisiana federal judge’s ruling upholding the statute. (via NY Post)

Of course, gun control groups were not pleased. The ruling still must make its way up the chain to a potential Supreme Court case. And there is no telling which High Court will show up for work that day, the originalists or the activists.

The Obiden Regime argued that ‘The people’s Right to Keep and bear arms’ did not apply to those under the age of 21.

Howsomever:

There are no age or maturity restrictions in the plain text of the Amendment, as there are in other constitutional provisions. See, e.g., U.S. Const. art. I, § 2, cl. 2 (members of the House of Representatives must be at least 25 years old). This suggests that the Second Amendment lacks a minimum age requirement. Moreover, in the unamended Constitution and Bill of Rights, the phrase “right of the people” appears in the First Amendment’s Assembly-and-Petition Clause, the Fourth Amendment’s Search-and-Seizure Clause, and the Ninth Amendment. All of these references confer “individual rights” and undoubtedly protect eighteen-to-twenty-year-olds as much as twenty-one-year-olds. In fact, with modifications, the rights they confer extend to younger minors.

The 5th Circuit concluded that the federal law did not meet the historical tradition of firearm regulation established by the Supreme Court’s Bruen ruling.

Under Bruen, the government has the burden of demonstrating that a law restricting conduct covered by “the Second Amendment’s plain text” is “consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” The 5th Circuit concluded that the government’s defense of Section 922(b)(1) failed that test.

This hopefully marks the end of the Reese case now that Donald Trump is in the White House.

It’s now up to the Trump administration to decide whether to appeal the Fifth Circuit’s decision to the U.S. Supreme Court or to let the decision stand unopposed. Trump has said he won’t lay a finger on our Second Amendment rights, and this might be the first test of that promise.

The wait for a case that placed the justifiable need provisions of ‘may issue’ carry permit states in the legal crosshairs of the high court has been a long one. But, in principle, any time is a good time for civil rights.

God speed to Constitutional Originalism.