Friday was a red-letter day for Second Amendment rights with a pair of announcements concerning interstate handgun sales and the federal government’s young adult pistol ban.
First, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled that the federal prohibition on direct interstate handgun purchases is unconstitutional. The three-judge panel rejected a district court ruling in favor of the government ban on sales across state lines.
Appeals court shredded government’s historical arguments
The Fifth Circuit turned aside the Department of Justice’s (DOJ’s) historical defense of the blanket prohibition:
“The only plausible way to reconcile the government’s view with the historical record is to read early laws restricting cross-border firearms sales at an extremely high level of generality, without regard to the significant differences between state borders and national borders, and also without recognizing that the historical record is devoid of laws meaningfully restricting the trade of firearms between states in the time soon after the United States became established as a single, cohesive entity.”
In other words, the lower court erred, and the government failed the Bruen test of alignment with the nation’s history and tradition of gun regulations.
The Firearms Policy Coalition (FPC) was a plaintiff in Elite Precision Customs v. ATF, the legal challenge to direct interstate handgun sales.
FPC President Brandon Combs rightly celebrated Friday’s landmark victory spearheaded by his organization,
“This is a massive victory for the People and another major defeat for the federal government’s unconstitutional gun control regime,” Combs said. “…The Fifth Circuit got it exactly right: this is a purchase ban, it is presumptively unconstitutional, and the government failed to justify it.”
The 2A advocate observed that the FPC “told the federal government we were coming for this ban, and today we beat them.”
DOJ will no longer prosecute dealers who sell handguns to young adults
More positive news came Friday when the DOJ, which was on the wrong side of the Fifth Circuit’s ruling, got it right concerning another Second Amendment issue.
The DOJ declared in a post on X that the ban on handgun sales to young adults is indefensible.
“The Office of Legal Counsel determined that 18-20-year-olds are among ‘the people’ protected by the Second Amendment. Eighteen-year-olds may vote, serve on juries, be drafted, and face adult criminal penalties, including capital punishment,” the release noted. “The Constitution protects the people’s right to keep and bear arms. The Department of Justice may not constitutionally seek to impose criminal penalties on dealers who sell handguns to law-abiding adults who, in nearly every other relevant respect, are members of the political community.”
The Supreme Court’s Bruen test, so pivotal in several recent gun rights decisions, was also cited by the DOJ in rejecting handgun sales bans to a significant segment of the adult population.
Without historical backing- and that is sorely lacking- the agency said that the responsibility for proving the constitutionality of the prohibition falls squarely on the federal government.
The DOJ further observed that, instead of banning law-abiding young adults from owning firearms, Founding Era laws did the opposite. Colonial and early American militia statutes mandated service from many turning 18.
They were also required to furnish their own weapons. How is that possible if acquiring these firearms was illegal, which it obviously wasn’t?
For clarity, the federal law against selling a handgun to someone 18- 20 years old can only be repealed by Congress. The DOJ’s statement doesn’t demand that courts rule a certain way or countermand state laws.
What it does say, with striking clarity, is that federal prosecutors will not enforce the law against firearm dealers who sell such weapons to young adults. That means that there’s still a potential minefield for this age bracket, and every state is different.
This sets the stage for more challenges to such laws. Reassembling Second Amendment rights was never going to come with one fell stroke in our federal system of government.
Instead, it’s moving on from one victory to another until the Founders’ intent on the freedom to keep and bear arms is fully realized again.
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