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For several years, the federal judiciary has been racing to strike down laws that restrict young people ages 18 to 20 from buying or possessing firearms. A slew of appeals courts have invalidated such measures, concluding that they violate the Second Amendment rights of people under 21. It seemed inevitable that these decisions would build a consensus that the Supreme Court might embrace—until Friday, when a court broke from the pack in a surprise decision. By an 8–4 vote, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit last week upheld Florida’s law prohibiting 18- to 20-year-olds from buying guns. Better yet, the court’s opinion was authored by Chief Judge William Pryor, a highly influential George W. Bush appointee. Pryor’s decision is doggedly originalist, a meticulous history lesson that proves the constitutionality of Florida’s ban beyond all reasonable doubt. It might just be persuasive enough to convince his ideological allies on the Supreme Court to uphold this lifesaving limit on the right to bear arms.
At least 22 states limit the ability of young adults ages 18 to 20 to buy weapons. So does federal law, which generally bars those under 21 from buying a handgun. These measures have come under legal fire at the U.S. Courts of Appeals as the Supreme Court has steadily expanded the Second Amendment. Already this year, the 5th Circuit has struck down the federal age restriction as unconstitutional. And the 3rd Circuit refused to revisit a recent decision invalidating Pennsylvania laws that bar those under 21 from carrying guns in public during a state of emergency. Last year, the 8th Circuit tossed out a Minnesota law forbidding those under 21 from obtaining a public carry permit. And in 2022, the 9th Circuit struck down California’s ban on the sale of rifles to those who are 18 to 20. (That decision was later set aside for reasons unrelated to the merits, though the 9th Circuit has not yet repudiated it.)
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These decisions were frustrating for two primary reasons. First, they were deadly: We know that people under 21 are far more likely to commit violent crime, especially with guns. One study, for instance, found that people ages 18 to 20 commit gun homicides at triple the rate of adults 21 and up. FBI data shows that this group commits deadly shootings at a much higher rate than older Americans. A disproportionate number of our deadliest mass shootings were committed by 18- to 20-year-olds who bought their weapons legally—including the Parkland shooter, whose massacre prompted Florida to enact its age restriction. Simply put, the data confirms that restricting young people from possessing firearms is a crucial tool for protecting all Americans from gun violence.
Second, the decisions striking down those age-based laws purported to be originalist, yet they were, at their core, living constitutionalism at its most freewheeling and undisciplined. SCOTUS has instructed lower courts to uphold firearm regulations that comport with the nation’s “history and tradition.” And in 1791, when the Second Amendment was ratified, people under age 21 were considered legal minors with virtually no rights themselves, including the right to buy or possess weapons without their parents’ consent. It is true that in the 20th century, most states shifted the age of majority back to 18. But that development does not mean that, as an originalist matter, the government violates our “history and tradition” when it applies the 18th-century age of majority to gun possession.
The courts that rejected this reality relied on the fact that in 1791, states often compelled 18- to 20-year-olds to join “the militia,” which required them to bear arms. Gun rights advocates raised this argument at the 11th Circuit, as well—and they had good reason to think they’d prevail. After all, the court has a strong majority of Republican appointees. And after an unusually liberal three-judge panel upheld Florida’s law in 2023, the full court swept away its decision, choosing to rehear the case en banc (with every judge participating). Typically, a rehearing en banc indicates that the full court disagrees with the panel decision. But that didn’t happen here. Instead, the en banc court reached the same conclusion. And in the process, it provided vital new support and legitimacy for the legal basis behind these age restrictions nationwide.
Chief Judge Pryor’s majority opinion is so cogent and compelling that it almost makes you believe that courts can fairly apply the hopelessly unworkable “history and tradition” test. He began by recounting the gruesome facts of the Parkland massacre, vividly reminding readers of the horrors that precipitated the statute’s enactment. From there, he explained that at the nation’s birth, “a person was an ‘infant’ or a ‘minor’ in the eyes of the law until age 21”—an ancient rule of English law that the founders carried over to America. “The Founders’ generation shared the view,” Pryor wrote, “that minors lacked the reason and judgment necessary to be trusted with legal rights,” quoting Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. Because of this “lack of reason,” minors “were subject to the ‘power’ of their parents until they reached age 21.”
In the 18th century, this “legal incapacity” deprived minors of “the capacity to contract, and to purchase goods on account.” They also generally had no income of their own, because their parents lay claim to any wages they earned for work. As a result, minors could not buy firearms themselves; they lacked both the legal right and the actual money to do so. When the Second Amendment was ratified in 1791, then, Americans ages 18 to 20 had no right to buy or possess a gun. So Florida’s law, and others like it, are “consistent with our historical tradition of firearm regulation.”
But what about mandatory militia service for those under 21? Unlike other federal courts, Pryor took the time to canvass the historical record. And he found that “states addressed the problem of providing minors the firearms necessary for militia service in different ways.” Some “exempted minors from the firearm requirement entirely.” Others “required parents of minors to acquire firearms for their militia service.” Another group “implicitly required parents to supply minors with firearms” by subjecting them to fines if their children did not obtain weapons. As universal militia service faded in the 19th century, many states enacted outright bans on the sale or transfer of firearms to people under 21.
These laws held firm until deep into the 20th century, when most states embraced 18 as the new age of majority. But as Pryor explained, “the federal right to keep and bear arms” does not turn on “a sliding scale defined by contemporary state law that varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.” A state does not “lose its constitutional authority to regulate minors’ access to firearms” just because it gives 18-year-olds “greater rights than they would have enjoyed at the Founding.” To hold otherwise would mean importing into the Second Amendment “an evolving standard of adulthood that is divorced from the text of the Amendment and from our regulatory tradition.”
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It is hard to overstate the significance of these words coming from the pen of a deeply conservative, dyed-in-the-wool Federalist Society stalwart like Pryor. He is arguably the most influential appeals court judge active today: Supreme Court justices regularly cite him by name, invoking his authority to bolster their own arguments—a rare honor reserved for marquee lower-court jurists. By embracing the constitutionality of Florida’s law, he has instantly increased the odds that SCOTUS will say such age restrictions comply with the Second Amendment. Chief Justice John Roberts, along with Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, will take his opinion very seriously when they decide this issue. And they likely will soon, because the 11th Circuit’s ruling creates a circuit split that the Supreme Court will feel obligated to resolve.
Thanks to Pryor, these justices now have exhaustive historical evidence that the Framers would have no objection to age limits on gun purchase or possession. It should not be a close call. Compared to the 11th Circuit’s decision, other courts’ opinions on this subject are half-baked and muddled, reliant upon dubious generalizations that gloss over key historical materials. History, in its messy complexity, does not always provide a single correct answer. But here, it does. And the odds just shot up that the Supreme Court will reach it.
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