BRUEN WINS AGAIN (just not in Illinois): PA’s Young Adult gun ban struck down by 3rd District Court of Appeals

Original article here

The Third Circuit Court of Appeals drove a nail in another gun control measure, this time in Pennsylvania.  The federal appeals court shot down Keystone State’s  ban on young adults 18-20 carrying firearms during declared states of emergency.

The Reload has more details:

In a 2-1 decision, a Third Circuit Court of Appeals panel blocked Pennsylvania from enforcing a trio of state statutes that together prohibit people between the ages of 18 and 20 from legally carrying firearms when a state of emergency is declared. The majority opinion, which reversed a lower court ruling, centered around the age at which the Second Amendment’s text protects Americans.

“The words ‘the people’ in the Second Amendment presumptively encompass all adult Americans, including 18- to-20-year-olds, and we are aware of no founding-era law that supports disarming people in that age group,” Judge Kent A. Jordan wrote in  “Accordingly, we will reverse and remand.”

The ruling adds to a growing body of federal court decisions casting doubt on age-based gun restrictions. That collection has grown in the time since the Supreme Court handed down its New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen decision in 2022. The new ruling arrives as federal judges in Texas, Tennessee, and Minnesota have similarly ruled that adults under the age of 21 are protected by the Second Amendment and cannot be deprived of the right to carry firearms for self-defense.

Bloomberg Law devoted multiple paragraphs to the dissent:

Judge L. Felipe Restrepo dissented and said there was evidence that the Founding-era public “would not have understood the text of the Second Amendment to extend its protection to those under 21.”

He noted students under 21 at universities like Yale, the University of North Carolina, and the University of Virginia weren’t considered full adults and the schools prohibited their possession of firearms during the Founding-era. He added that people under 21 in that era didn’t just lack some legal rights, but nearly all of them.

“The fact that this class of persons had no power to independently exercise almost any rights of speech, association, conscience, marriage, contract, suffrage, petition, or property, strongly suggests that they would not be understood as receiving constitutional protections as members of ‘the people’ under the Second Amendment, Restrepo said.

The good judge was reaching pretty hard to come up with that.  But such is the dedication to the gun control plantation among those who don’t like the Second Amendment.