A federal judge just struck down a ban on dealers selling handguns to 18- to 20-year-olds. Our Founding Fathers would be proud. As the former slave and civil rights advocate Frederick Douglass said, “A man’s rights rest in three boxes. The ballot box, jury box, and the cartridge box.”
MRCTV reported on May 11:
A federal judge [Robert E. Payne] in Virginia on Thursday struck down a federal ban against licensed firearms dealers selling handguns to 18-to-20-year-olds, saying the rule was “not consistent” with the Second Amendment…
The case had been brought by John Corey Fraser who, at 20 years old, had tried to by a handgun from a gun seller in May of 2022. Fraser was denied the sale thanks to a longstanding federal ban on licensed firearms dealers selling handguns to anyone under the age of 21, despite the legal age of adulthood being 18 and even though 18-to-20-year-olds are still legally able to purchase handguns in private sales.
So, he filed a lawsuit challenging the Gun Control Act of 1968 and the ATF’s under-21 rule as unconstitutional. And it seems Payne agreed.
The Richmond-based U.S. district judge wrote in his 71-page opinion that there’s no solid legal standard for the 21 age limit, especially since Americans younger than that can both buy handguns in private transactions and enlist in the military. Hence, the Second Amendment certainly applies to Americans ages 18 and up, Payne concluded.
It’s also a fact that teenagers and even young boys joined the American Revolutionary Army, and the Founders would have remembered those youths’ fight for freedom when the Second Amendment was written. Founder Alexander Hamilton was only between 18 and 20 years old when he quit school to join the Revolution, and future President James Monroe was in his late teens when he joined the Revolutionary Army.
Founder George Mason, a delegate to the Constitutional Convention who is called the “Father of the Bill of Rights” (the Bill of Rights that includes the Second Amendment, of course), spoke for the majority of the Founding Fathers when he discussed the issue of gun ownership and gun rights: “Forty years ago, when the resolution of enslaving America was formed in Great-Britain, the British parliament was advised … to disarm the people. That it was the best and most effectual way to enslave them.” Gun rights are essential liberties for Americans.
Judge Payne wrote in his opinion, ”Because the statutes and regulations in question are not consistent with our Nation’s history and tradition, they, therefore, cannot stand.”
As Rush Limbaugh put it, “Do you know why there’s a Second Amendment? In case the government fails to follow the first one.”
Join the conversation as a VIP Member