[Nemo]

11th Circuit CoA says its good. No cite to case in article.

Nemo

Florida law banning firearm sales to people younger than 21 upheld by federal appeals court

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit upheld a law in Florida on Thursday that bans firearm sales to individuals between the ages of 18 and 21.

www.foxnews.com

 

[atlsrt44]

How is it consistent with our nations history at all?

How many people fought in the revolution, war of 1812, civil war who were under 18 let alone 21?

I guarantee they owned guns as well

 

[seajay]

How is it consistent with our nations history at all?

How many people fought in the revolution, war of 1812, civil war who were under 18 let alone 21?

I guarantee they owned guns as well

While I don't approve of the logic it does in a way make sense. In the early days of this country's beginning yes children did own guns. Even children barely able to hold them up would get their gun and bring dinner home for the family. Now very few families even allow their children to think about guns mush less train them to use guns. Not many take their young children out hunting nor would even allow a well qualified person to take them out just plinkking. Most (not all) children are no longer relied on by the family in easy or rough times.

 

[ber950]

I am not certain but I think there is a circuit split on this It may have only been a state court

 

[Nemo]

5th Circuit Fed Trial Court (Texas case) said 18 for riles is good, 21 for handguns is bad. All guns should be 18. Tx noticed to appeal to 5th Circuit then withdrew.

I do not know if that makes a split.

Nemo

 

[Malum Prohibitum]

Unanimous opinion.

Rosembaum, an Obama appointee, was joined in the ruling by Circuit Judge Charles Wilson, who was appointed by President Bill Clinton, and District Judge Anne Conway, an appointee of George H.W. Bush.​

https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/09/politics/florida-gun-law-parkland-marjory-stoneman-douglas-high-school/index.html

 

[Malum Prohibitum]

Link to 40 pages

https://media.ca11.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/files/202112314.pdf

 

[Malum Prohibitum]

In our view, though, the Reconstruction Era historical sources are the most relevant to our inquiry on the scope of the right to keep and bear arms. That is so because those sources reflect the public understanding of the right to keep and bear arms at the very time the states made that right applicable to the state governments by ratifying the Fourteenth Amendment.

 

[Malum Prohibitum]

As to the first component of Bruen’s first step, it’s not clear whether 18-to-20-year-olds “are part of ‘the people’ whom the Second Amendment protects,” id. at 2134 (citation omitted). In Bruen, the “pleadings” described the petitioners as “law-abiding, adult cit- izens of Rensselaer County, New York.” Id. at 2124–25 (emphasis added). The Court then repeated that description of the petitioners before concluding that the petitioners “[we]re part of ‘the people’ whom the Second Amendment protects.” Id. at 2134. But the historical record reveals that 18-to-20-year-olds did not enjoy the full range of civil and political rights that adults did. See infra at 30. And even today, 18-to-20-year-olds do not share all the rights that those over 21 do. For instance, the drinking age and tobacco-use age in most states is 21.

 

[Malum Prohibitum]

We begin with the “how”—that is, how the Act’s historical analogues similarly (and, in most cases, more severely) burdened Second Amendment rights for 18-to-20-year-olds. Alabama, Tennessee, and Kentucky led the charge in passing laws that prohibited 18-to-20-year-olds from buying (or even possessing) arms. Twelve years before the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification—and continuing through the Reconstruction Era—Alabama prohibited selling, giving, or lending, “to any male minor, a bowie knife, or knife, or instrument of the like kind or description, by whatever named called, or air gun, or pistol,” 1855 Ala. Laws 17. At that time,theageofmajorityinAlabamawastwenty-oneyears. In other words, in 1856, Alabama law prohibited the sale (and even the giving or lending) of handguns and other handheld, smaller arms to 18-to-20-year-olds.

 

[Malum Prohibitum]

In sum, then, Alabama and Tennessee generally prohibited selling, loaning, or even giving handguns and other handheld arms to 18-to-20-year-olds in the years leading up to the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification. Because those laws made it unlawful not only to sell those types of arms to 18-to-20-year-olds, but also to lend those arms to that age group, those laws imposed a greater burden on the right to keep and bear arms than does the Act, which (as Florida concedes) leaves 18-to-20-year-olds free to obtain fire- arms through legal means other than purchasing.

 

[Malum Prohibitum]

And that is well in keeping with traditional firearm regula- tions. Public universities have long prohibited students from pos- sessing firearms on their campuses. On August 9, 1810, for in- stance, the University of Georgia passed a resolution that prohib- ited students from keeping “any gun, pistol,” or “other offensive weapon in College or elsewhere,” meaning that students could not possess such weapons even while they were away from college.

 

[Malum Prohibitum]

That context serves as the backdrop for the flurry of state regulations, enacted soon after the Fourteenth Amendment’s rati- fication, that banned the sale of firearms to all 18-to-20-year-olds— on or off a college campus. Between the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification and the close of the nineteenth century,19 at least six- teen states and the District of Columbia joined Alabama, Kentucky, and Tennessee—a total of at least twenty jurisdictions—in banning sales of firearms to 18-to-20-year-olds.

 

[Malum Prohibitum]

So long guns, which are neither smaller nor handheld, are not of the same type as the list of weapons preceding the catch-all phrase. We need not resolve that debate here. Instead, we simply assume for purposes of this opinion that the statutes do not cover long guns.

 

[Malum Prohibitum]

The courts generally shared the public’s approval of laws that prohibited providing handguns and other dangerous weapons to minors. Take the Supreme Court of Tennessee. In 1871, that court “held that a statute that forbade openly carrying a pistol . . . violated the state constitutional provision (which the court equated with the Second Amendment).” Heller, 554 U.S. at 629 (citing An- drews v. State, 50 Tenn. 165, 187 (1871)). Seven years later, that same court described Section 4864 of Tennessee’s Code—which prohibited “the sale, gift, or loan of a pistol or other like dangerous weapon to a minor”—as “not only constitutional . . . but wise and salutary in all its provisions.” Callicutt, 69 Tenn. at 716–17; see also Dabbs v. State, 39 Ark. 353, 357 (1882) (placing a law that banned the sale of firearms in the same permissible “category” as laws reg- ulating “gaming, the keeping of bawdy-houses,” and “the sale of spirituous liquors”).

 

[Malum Prohibitum]

Given these facts, it should come as no surprise that our re- search indicates that laws prohibiting the sale of arms to minors went virtually “unchallenged,” Bruen, 142 S. Ct. at 2137, from their enactment through the middle of the nineteenth century. In fact, our research suggests that a litigant challenged a law banning the sale of arms to minors only once during that time frame. See Cal- licutt, 69 Tenn. at 716–17 (rejecting a challenge to Tennessee’s stat- ute, which banned selling, loaning, or even giving handguns and other arms to minors). And the Supreme Court has recognized that “where a governmental practice has been open, widespread, and unchallenged since the early days of the Republic, the practice should guide our interpretation of an ambiguous constitutional provision.” Bruen, 142 S. Ct. at 2137 (quoting Noel Canning, 573 U.S. at 572 (Scalia, J., concurring in the judgment)). We can see no reason why, when we are construing a constitutional provision in- corporated against the States by the Fourteenth Amendment the rule should be any different where a governmental practice has been open, widespread, and unchallenged since the early days of the Reconstruction Era ratification. Indeed, the fact that there was apparently only a single challenge to these twenty statutes’ consti- tutionality until well into the twentieth century suggests that the public understanding at the time of the ratification considered the statutory prohibitions constitutionally permissible.
Based on the historical record, we can distill two key points. First, several states burdened 18-to-20-year-olds’ rights to keep and bear arms—both before and after the Fourteenth Amendment’s
ratification—by making it unlawful even to give or lend handguns and other deadly weapons to minors. In total, at least nineteen states and the District of Columbia banned the sale and even the giving or loaning of handguns and other deadly weapons to 18-to- 20-year-olds by the close of the nineteenth century. Second, those states did so to enhance public safety.
These points show that the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Act “is consistent with this Nation’s his- torical tradition of firearm regulation.” Bruen, 142 S. Ct. at 2126. To begin with, the Act is no more restrictive than its forebearers: while the Act burdens 18-to-20-year-olds’ rights to buy firearms, unlike its Reconstruction Era analogues, it still leaves 18-to-20-year- olds free to acquire any type of firearm—including “the quintessen- tial self-defense weapon,” the handgun, Heller, 554 U.S. at 630—in legal ways, as long as they don’t buy the weapons.
The Act also aims to improve public safety just like its his- torical analogues sought to do—that is, the Act has an analogous “why.”
So the Act and its historical predecessors are “relevantly sim- ilar under the Second Amendment.” Bruen, 142 S. Ct. at 2132. And for that reason, the Act does not infringe on the right to keep and bear arms. See id. at 2161 (Kavanaugh, J., concurring) (explain- ing that Bruen articulates the test “for evaluating whether a gov- ernment regulation infringes on the Second Amendment right to possess and carry guns for self-defense”).

 

[Malum Prohibitum]

Trying to avoid this conclusion, the NRA responds that that Founding Era federal law obliged 18-to-20-year-olds to join the mi- litia. See, e.g., Act of May 8, 1792, ch. 33, § 1, 1 Stat. 271, 271 (re- quiring “each and every free able-bodied white citizen” that is over “the age of eighteen years, and under the age of forty-five years” to “enroll[] in the militia”). In other words, the NRA contends that the fact that Congress required 18-to-20-year-olds to muster for the militia is compelling evidence that 18-to-20-year-olds had the right to an unimpeded ability to purchase firearms.

The NRA’s conclusion is incorrect. The NRA mistakes a le- gal obligation for a right. See Heller, 554 U.S. at 605 (explaining that the Second Amendment “protects an individual right uncon- nected with militia service”); see also id. at 582, 601, 608, 610, 611, 612, 613, 616, 617. The fact that federal law obliged 18-to-20-year- olds to join the militia does not mean that 18-to-20-year-olds had an absolute right to buy arms.

To the contrary, the historical record shows that merely be- ing part of the militia did not entitle 18-to-20-year-olds to enjoy the same political and civil rights as adults. See, e.g., Corinne T. Field, The Struggle for Equal Adulthood: Gender, Race, Age, and the Fight for Citizenship in Antebellum America 55 (2014) (explaining that, during the early nineteenth century, the “relevance of chron- ological age stood out most sharply in the celebration of age twenty-one as a transition to full citizenship for white men”). For instance, the Tennessee Supreme Court expressly rejected the ar- gument that “every citizen who is subject to military duty has the right ‘to keep and bear arms,’ and that this right necessarily implies the right to buy or otherwise acquire, and the right in others to give, sell, or loan to him” firearms and concluded instead that Ten- nessee’s prohibition on the sale, gifting, or lending of firearms to those under 21 “d[id] not in fact abridge, the constitutional right of the ‘citizens of the State to keep and bear arms for their common defense.’” Callicutt, 69 Tenn. at 716.

In other words, Congress imposed upon 18-to-20-year-olds a specific obligation to serve in the militia but did not give them all the rights associated with full citizenship (like, at that time, the right to vote). So we can’t infer from the fact that 18-to-20-year- olds had a specific obligation that they had a specific right.

Plus, even assuming that the Founding Era federal muster- ing obligations could be viewed as entitling 18-to-20-year-olds to buy firearms in 1791, that’s not the public understanding that pre- vails here. Rather, it’s clear that the public understanding of the Second Amendment at the time of the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification—as demonstrated by the wealth of Fourteenth Amend- ment-Ratification Era analogues for Florida’s law—permitted the states to limit the sale of firearms to those 21 and older. See Ap- pendix (collecting laws that banned 18-to-20-year-olds from buying or possessing firearms). So even if federal law obliged 18-to-20- year-olds to muster for the militia, laws banning that same group from buying firearms do not infringe on the right to keep and bear arms. And the fact that Congress required 18-to-20-year-olds to muster for the militia cannot overcome the litany of historical analogues that are relevantly similar to the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Act.

 

[jrm]

A judge in the 11th has asked to poll sua sponte for a rehearing en banc.

 

[Malum Prohibitum]

Florida House Panel Backs Lowering Age to Buy Rifles, Other Long Guns

With backing from Speaker Paul Renner, a House panel on Monday approved a bill that would lower the minimum age from 21 to 18 to buy rifles and other long guns in Florida. The bill (HB 1543) would reverse part of a 2018 law that set the minimum age at 21 after a gunman killed 17 students and...

www.nbcmiami.com