Conservative Judges Split On Issues Of Teens' Buying, Possessing Guns

The next major Second Amendment case may concern teenagers. Appeals courts are split on whether the government may prevent 18- to 20-year-olds from buying or carrying guns. Next week, the Supreme Court will consider whether to hear one of those cases.

In many gun cases, judges appointed by Republicans are on one side and those appointed by Democrats on the other. The teen-buying issue has created a rift among conservative judges committed to determining the original meaning of the Constitution, the New York Times reports.

Last month, Judge William Pryor wrote the majority opinion Jr. for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, in Atlanta, an 8-to-4 decision upholding a Florida law that prohibits the sale of firearms to people under 21. Pryor was on President Trump’s short list in 2017 to fill a Supreme Court vacancy, with analysts saying he might be too far to the right.

The same year, Nikolas Cruz, then 18, legally bought a semiautomatic rifle at a Florida gun store. A year later, he used it to kill 17 people and wound 17 others at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla.

Florida lawmakers responded by enacting the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Act, which made it a crime for people under 21 to buy guns.

Then the Supreme Court transformed Second Amendment law, introducing a new test to judge the constitutionality of gun control measures. Justice Clarence Thomas said for the court such laws must be struck down unless they are “consistent with this nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

In the new opinion, Pryor examined the historical evidence and found that people under 21 were considered minors when the Constitution was adopted. Seven judges joined the opinion, two of them appointed by Trump.

The four dissenters were all appointed by Trump. Judge Andrew Brasher, a former Pryor law clerk, wrote that the legal age for adulthood when the Second Amendment was adopted was irrelevant. What matters, he wrote, is whether 18-year-olds are considered adults today.

Pryor responded that the original meaning of the Second Amendment was fixed at the time it was adopted. Judge Brasher’s dissent, he wrote, “would have us hold that the Second Amendment turns on an evolving standard of adulthood that is divorced from the text of the amendment and from our regulatory tradition.”

The case that the Supreme Court will decide whether to hear involves a Minnesota law that makes it a crime for people under 21 to carry guns in public. Last year, the Eighth Circuit struck the law down, saying that the Second Amendment required letting those as young as 18 be armed.