On Friday, Federal District Court Judge Thomas S. Kleeh ruled that the federal prohibition against 18 to 20-year-olds purchasing handguns is unconstitutional.
The plaintiffs in the case are Steven Robert Brown, Benjamin Weekley, the Second Amendment Foundation, and the West Virginia Citizens Defense League.
Judge Kleeh blocked enforcement of the law against the plaintiffs in the case and all 18-to-20-year-olds nationwide.
“[B]ecause Plaintiffs’ conduct – the purchase of handguns – ‘fall[s] [within] the Second Amendment’s ‘unqualified command’ and the challenged statutes and regulations are not ‘consistent with the Nation’s historic tradition of firearm regulation,’” Judge Kleeh wrote in Brown v. ATF, “the Court FINDS 18 U.S.C. §§ 922(b)(1) and (c)(1) facially unconstitutional and as applied to Plaintiffs.”
“The Biden Justice Department argued that people in this age group were not adults, which was patently ludicrous,” Adam Kraut, SAF’s executive vice president, said in a statement. “The government simply could not defend the constitutionality of the handgun prohibition, and Judge Kleeh’s ruling makes that clear.”
Judge Kleeh, a Donald Trump appointee, found there was no record of any gun sales to 18-to-20-year-olds being banned during the Founding Era.
“Defendants have not presented any evidence of age-based restrictions on the purchase or sale of firearms from before or at the Founding or during the Early Republic,” he wrote. “Defendants have likewise failed to offer evidence of similar regulation between then and 1791 or in a relevant timeframe thereafter. For that reason alone, Defendants have failed to meet the burden imposed by Bruen.”
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