TALLAHASSEE, Fla. – With a federal appeals court poised next week to hear a challenge to a Florida law that bars people under age 21 from buying rifles and other long guns, the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday at least temporarily allowed a Pennsylvania gun restriction on young adults.
The Supreme Court overturned an appeals-court ruling that blocked a Pennsylvania law preventing people under age 21 from carrying guns during declared emergencies.
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While the specifics of the Florida and Pennsylvania laws differ, both cases involve Second Amendment challenges to gun restrictions for people ages 18 to 20. Both also focus heavily on how to interpret Supreme Court precedents and the “historical tradition” of gun regulation.
In its ruling Tuesday, the Supreme Court did not explain its reasons but sent the Pennsylvania dispute back to the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals “for further consideration in light of” a Supreme Court opinion this summer in a Texas gun-rights case. In that case, known as United States v. Rahimi, the Supreme Court backed a ban on gun possession by people under domestic-violence restraining orders.
The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which will hear arguments Tuesday on the Florida law, put the case on hold until after the Supreme Court ruled in the Rahimi case. Attorneys for Florida and the National Rifle Association, which is challenging the constitutionality of the Florida law, have filed briefs in recent months addressing how the Rahimi opinion applies -- or doesn’t -- to the case.
In a brief filed last month, the NRA also cited the 3rd Circuit’s decision in the Pennsylvania case to help support its challenge to the Florida law.
Then-Gov. Rick Scott and the Republican-controlled Legislature in 2018 barred people under 21 from buying rifles and other long guns after Nikolas Cruz, who was 19 at the time, used a semiautomatic rifle to kill 17 students and faculty members at Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Federal law already prevented people under 21 from buying handguns.
While the state law prevents people under 21 from buying long guns, it allows them to receive the guns, for example, as gifts from family members.
The NRA filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the law, but Chief U.S. District Judge Mark Walker upheld the age restriction. A three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals also upheld the law, but the NRA asked the full appeals court to consider the case. The full court will hold what is known as an “en banc” hearing Tuesday in Atlanta.
A key to the case could be how the appeals court interprets the Rahimi decision and a 2022 U.S. Supreme Court opinion in a case known as New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, which said gun laws must be “consistent with this nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”
The NRA has argued that the Bruen decision prevents the Florida law.
“This law is unconstitutional. The Second Amendment’s text protects young adults’ right to purchase a firearm, and the state has not proven that the ban is consistent with our nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation. The young adult ban cannot stand,” a July NRA brief said.
But in an August brief, attorneys for the state cited the Rahimi opinion in arguing the appeals court should uphold the Florida law.
“In upholding a law that disarmed an individual subject to a domestic-violence restraining order, the (Supreme) Court was careful not to ‘suggest that the Second Amendment prohibits the enactment of laws banning the possession of guns by categories of persons thought by a legislature to present a special danger of misuse,’” the state brief said, partially quoting the Rahimi opinion. “Whatever might be said about other legislative categories, or of a general ban on possession, the history shows that it is at least permissible to restrict firearm purchases by those under the age of 21, who are still free to exercise their Second Amendment rights by obtaining arms from more mature adults.”