The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday turned down an opportunity to weigh in on whether the government may restrict 18- to 20-year-olds from buying or carrying guns, a question that has divided lower courts.
The case concerned a Minnesota law that makes it a crime for people under 21 to carry guns in public. Last year, the Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the law, ruling that the Second Amendment required letting those as young as 18 be armed.
Lower courts have struggled to apply recent Supreme Court decisions that transformed Second Amendment law by introducing a new test to judge the constitutionality of gun control measures. As Justice Clarence Thomas put it in his 2022 majority opinion in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, such laws must be struck down unless they are “consistent with this nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” Last year, however, in United States v. Rahimi, the Court ruled that the government can temporarily disarm people subject to restraining orders for domestic violence. The decision was seen by many as a revision of the test announced in Bruen.
Although the Minnesota law was struck down, in March the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit upheld a Florida law that prohibits the sale of firearms to people under 21. The inevitable appeal of this decision will give the Supremes another chance to consider the question.
In other news from the courts, the Boston-based 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last week ruled that a Massachusetts law banning assault weapons is not unconstitutional and is consistent with the nation’s history of firearms regulation under the 2nd Amendment.
The 1998 law was modeled after a now-expired federal assault weapons ban and prohibits owning or selling certain semiautomatic weapons, as well as magazines capable of holding more than 10 rounds of ammunition. Lawyers for a gun rights group and a would-be assault weapons purchaser argued that the state’s ban could not stand after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 Bruen decision. But the Circuit panel said their conclusion was driven in large part by their decision last year upholding a Rhode Island ban on large-capacity magazines, which the court had similarly concluded was consistent with historical tradition.
Democratic Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell’s office pointed to 18th and 19th Century bans on gun powder, trap guns, and long-bladed “Bowie” knives as examples of weapons being banned because they posed a unique danger to public safety.
