On Tuesday, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously ruled that the statute is unconstitutional because it violates the Second Amendment and does not align with the nation’s history and tradition of firearm regulations.
The decision in Worth v. Jackson means that, once again, young adults can freely exercise their constitutional rights in Minnesota.
Judge Duane Benton wrote, “Minnesota has not met its burden to proffer sufficient evidence to rebut the presumption that 18 to 20-year-olds seeking to carry handguns in public for self-defense are protected by the right to keep and bear arms. The Carry Ban…violates the Second Amendment as applied to Minnesota through the Fourteenth Amendment, and thus, is unconstitutional.
The ruling continues a pattern of egregious gun control laws being struck down across the nation by the courts.
It is also the first federal appeals court decision made since June’s Rahimi ruling, which strongly indicates that the high court decision may not have the effect on gun rights cases that some feared.
Judge Benton noted that judges evaluated possible age restrictions as applied to the Second Amendment and found them sorely lacking.
“Importantly, the Second Amendment’s plain text does not have an age limit. Ordinary, law-abiding 18 to 20-year-old Minnesotans are unambiguously members of the people.”
The state claimed that those of this age group “were not legally autonomous members of the political community at the founding.” The court dismissed this argument by observing that they are presently part of the political community as fully legal adults.
Without an age stipulation, the defendants had to prove to the judges that a historical precedent exists in the nation’s legal tradition for stripping carry rights away from young adults.
What Minnesota’s legal team attempted was appalling.
While trying to establish some — any — examples in the nation’s tradition of firearm regulation to prove their law’s merit, the state resorted to amplifying some of the more sinister statutes in U.S. history.
For example, they noted to the appeals court that there were indeed certain “status-based restrictions from the Founding Era.” These included barring gun ownership by Catholics, slaves, American Indians and other minorities.
This was the best Minnesota could do to support its gun control law?
The state argued that just as these groups were once considered too dangerous to possess weapons, young adults are also more of a threat for violence compared to the rest of the U.S. population.
This erroneous and frankly shocking presentation was shot down by Judge Benton and his fellow appeals court jurists. He swept that argument aside while declaring that such laws would “subjugate the right to bear arms in public for self-defense” to “a second-class right.”
He added that such action banning young adults from carrying firearms is unjustifiable.
The state hardly stopped there, presenting the ludicrous idea that 18 to 20-year-olds were considered minors during the Founding Era. Attorneys argued that under common law, this age group was not considered to be fully adult.
This also failed to hold water in the appeals court, as Benton emphatically rejected that presumption. He observed that the Militia Act of 1792 required that these young adults acquire firearms, which completely obliterated the state’s stand.
Benton dryly noted, “A mandate to acquire a firearm is hardly evidence that one was previously prohibited from owning one.”
The state then turned to rules on college campuses during the Founding Era that restricted firearm possession. However, the appeals court determined that these and many more restrictions enacted by institutions of higher learning hardly carried the weight of state or federal law.
If they were enacted by lawmakers, they would have been struck down as blatantly unconstitutional.
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