SC federal judges’ opinion would allow 18-year-olds to legally purchase handguns

A three-judge panel of the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday declared unconstitutional federal laws that prohibit people under 21 from buying handguns from federally licensed gun dealers.

The 2-1 opinion, if upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, would overturn longstanding federal laws that now prohibit people under 21 from buying handguns from federally licensed firearms dealers, who often sell their weapons through commercial stores.

However, it could be years before any appeals in the case reach the Supreme Court. The three-judge panel’s opinion could also be appealed to the full 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, which has 15 judges, before the matter reaches the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, the decades-old federal law prohibiting people under 21 from buying handguns at gun stores stands.

The 88-page majority opinion was written by U.S. Judge Jay Richardson, a Columbia resident and former federal prosecutor who was a lead prosecutor in the Dylann Roof death penalty case involving the mass murder on nine African-Americans at a Charleston church.

The 4th Circuit is the nation’s second-highest federal court, one step below the U.S. Supreme Court, and one level above each state’s federal district trial courts. The 4th Circuit, one of 12 regional federal appellate courts, hears appeals from South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia and Maryland.

Richardson’s opinion, written in clear English laced with numerous lengthy footnotes, legal and historical citations, is grounded in early 1700s American history, when many young people had guns and states had militias to fight “renegade” Native Americans and maintain order and 18-year-old young men were required to join militias.

“We first find that 18-year-olds possess Second Amendment rights,” Richardson’s opinion says. “They enjoy almost every other constitutional right, and they were required at the time of the Founding (of the United States) to serve in the militia and furnish their own weapons.”

The opinion also cites Congress’ first federal Militia Act of 1792, which required “each and every free able-bodied white male citizen of the respective states, resident therein, who is or shall be of the age of eighteen years, and under the age of forty-five years .... shall severally and respectively be enrolled in the militia.”

Richardson wrote studies have shown that only a small number of handguns used in crimes were purchased at gun stores from federally licensed firearms dealers.

Existing federal law actually prevents “law-abiding, less-dangerous” young adults from buying a handgun at a gun shop from a federally licensed firearms dealer, Richardson wrote.

Moreover, “The irony does not escape us that, under the government’s reasoning, the same 18- to 20-year-old men and women we depend on to protect us in the armed forces and who have since our Founding been trusted with the most-sophisticated weaponry should nonetheless be prevented from purchasing a handgun from a federally licensed dealer for their own protection...,” Richardson wrote.

Richardson’s opinion triggered a lively dissent from the three-judge panel’s third member, Judge James Wynn of North Carolina, who framed the issue as a legally flawed attack on one of the nation’s biggest problems — deaths and injuries from handguns and other firearms.

Congress — not activist judges — should set the age limit, Wynn wrote.

“Today, my good colleagues (Richardson and Judge Steven Agee) in the majority break new ground by invalidating a modest and long-established effort to control gun violence,” Wynn wrote. “The majority’s decision to grant the gun lobby a victory in a fight it lost on Capitol Hill more than 50 years ago is not compelled by law. Nor is it consistent with the proper role of the federal judiciary in our democratic system.”

Gun ownership rights granted under the Second Amendment are worthy of some restriction because they “are singularly capable of causing harm” and Circuit Courts across the country have protected “the individual right to keep and bear arms while honoring the public’s ‘right not to be shot’,” Wynn wrote.

Wynn also noted that current laws do allow young adults aged 18 to 20 to possess and use handguns and are able to buy them “through unlicensed, but otherwise legal” sales, such as at gun shows.

And, wrote Wynn, Congress enacted the current prohibition on restricting sales of handguns to 18- to 20-year-old adults in the 1960s after a lengthy investigation that linked the “easy availability of firearms to young people under 21 and the rise in crime,” Wynn wrote.

Congress had before it “ample evidence” that young people under 21 were involved in the majority of arrests for serious crimes and that easy access to firearms was responsible for numerous suicides and gun accidents, Wynn wrote. Congress identified a specific problem — “deaths and injuries from guns in the hands of young people” — and passed its law banning anyone under 21 from buying a handgun. (Eighteen-year-olds are still allowed to buy long guns and shotguns.)

Where the case goes next

It is not clear what happens next. The losing party in this case — the Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms, Tobacco and Explosives — has several appeal options.

In 2012, a ruling by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the same federal law that Richardson’s opinion would overturn.

Eric Tirschwell, managing director for Everytown Law, a gun safety group that filed a friend-of-the-court brief siding with the ATF, said, “The majority’s opinion is an extreme outlier that departs from all relevant precedent, and we believe it will likely be reversed by the full court on further review.”

The National Rifle Association, on the other hand, applauded the decision. “The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals recognized today that millions of young adults must be allowed to exercise their fundamental constitutional right.”

The case was appealed by Natalia Marshall, a Virginia resident who was turned down for a gun purchase when she was 18. The majority opinion said she had “good reason” to want to buy a handgun for personal protection because she had an abusive ex-boyfriend.

Marshall worked as a horse trainer, “often finding herself in remote rural areas where she interacts with unfamiliar people. Having grown up training with guns, she believes that a handgun’s ease of carrying, training and use makes it the most effective tool for her protection,” the majority opinion said.

One irony not mentioned in Richardson’s opinion is that a key feature in his most-celebrated criminal case as a federal prosecutor involved mass murderer Dylann Roof’s efforts to buy a handgun.

Roof had been thwarted from buying a handgun from a South Carolina gun store because he was not 21, according to undisputed evidence at his trial, which took place in late 2016 and early 2017.

Shortly after he turned 21, Roof bought a handgun at a Columbia area gun shop and planned his attack on the African-American church. In June 2015, he carried out a mass killing of Black people, a massacre he hoped would spark a racial war. Roof is now on federal death row awaiting execution.

Richardson, one of the 4th Circuit’s newest judges, was appointed to that court in 2018 by then-President Trump. Agee, who joined Richardson in the majority opinion, was appointed by then-President George W. Bush in 2008. Wynn, the dissenter, was appointed by then-President Obama in 2010.