A federal appeals court struck down a Minnesota law on Tuesday that prohibited 18- to 20-year-olds from obtaining a permit to carry a handgun in public for self-defense.
The Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, based in St. Louis, Mo., delivered a victory to the six plaintiffs — three gun-advocacy groups and three adults between the ages of 18 and 20 — all of whom sued the Minnesota public-safety commissioner in 2021. The court found that the age restriction violated the individuals’ Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms as American citizens, opening the door for 18- to 20-year-olds to obtain a permit-to-carry license for handguns in Minnesota.
“Importantly, the Second Amendment’s plain text does not have an age limit,” Judge Duane Benton wrote in the 27-page opinion, joined by two other judges. “Ordinary, law-abiding 18 to 20-year-old Minnesotans are unambiguously members of the people.”
Minnesota previously excluded adults under 21 from its definition of “members of the people” because they “were not legally autonomous members of the political community at the founding” of the state. However, the court said that they are part of the political community now and should not be precluded from the Second Amendment just because they are a supposed danger to the public.
The three-judge panel sided with a lower court’s ruling last year that deemed the state’s permit-to-carry age requirement unconstitutional. That decision allowed the statute to remain in effect while the state appealed the case to a higher court.
Minnesota argued that the law was rooted in historical precedent to regulate firearms in the name of public safety, but state officials failed to provide sufficient evidence that “18 to 20-year-olds present a danger to the public,” the Eighth Circuit said.
The court cited the Supreme Court’s recent rulings in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen and United States v. Rahimi to make its case.
In last year’s Bruen decision, the Supreme Court ruled that New York’s gun law, which prohibited the issuance of a pistol license unless there was “proper cause,” unconstitutionally prevented law-abiding citizens in the state from exercising their Second Amendment rights to defend themselves. Contrary to Minnesota’s claim, the Eighth Circuit argued that the right to carry a firearm in public for self-defense is deeply rooted in history and should be protected.
“A legislature’s ability to deem a category of people dangerous based only on belief would subjugate the right to bear arms ‘in public for self-defense’ to ‘a second-class right, subject to an entirely different body of rules than the other Bill of Rights guarantees,’” Benton wrote, citing Bruen.
Last month, the Supreme Court upheld a federal ban on people subject to domestic-violence restraining orders from possessing firearms. The Eighth Circuit used the ruling in that case, Rahimi, to argue that a law temporarily disarming individuals who pose a credible threat to others can be upheld. Minnesota failed to convince the court that 18- to 20-year-olds fall into that category.