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An appeals court had struck down a Minnesota law that applied to 18- to 20-year olds, saying it violated a new Second Amendment test focusing on history.
April 21, 2025, 12:55 p.m. ET
The Supreme Court on Monday turned down an opportunity to weigh in on whether the government may restrict 18- to 20-year-olds from buying or carrying guns, a question that has divided the lower courts.
The case concerned a Minnesota law that makes it a crime for people under 21 to carry guns in public. Last year, the Eighth Circuit struck down the law, ruling that the Second Amendment required letting those as young as 18 be armed.
“The Second Amendment’s plain text does not have an age limit,” wrote Judge Duane Benton, who was appointed by President George W. Bush.
He relied on the 26th Amendment, which lowered the voting age to 18 in 1971. The amendment, Judge Benton wrote, “unambiguously places 18- to 20-year-olds within the national political community.”
Lower courts have struggled to apply recent Supreme Court decisions that transformed Second Amendment law by introducing a new test to judge the constitutionality of gun control measures. As Justice Clarence Thomas put it in his 2022 majority opinion in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, such laws must be struck down unless they are “consistent with this nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”
Keith Ellison, Minnesota’s attorney general, had urged the justices to return the case to the appeals court for reconsideration in light of United States v. Rahimi. In that case, decided last year, the Supreme Court ruled that the government can temporarily disarm people subject to restraining orders for domestic violence.
