By Dara Kam ©2024 The News Service of Florida
TALLAHASSEE — Saying the restriction is “fully consistent” with “historical tradition,” lawyers for Florida are urging an Atlanta-based appeals court to uphold a law preventing people under age 21 from purchasing rifles and other long guns.
The National Rifle Association filed a lawsuit challenging the age restriction shortly after then-Gov. Rick Scott and the Republican-controlled Legislature rushed to include it in a sweeping school safety bill that passed after the February 2018 mass shooting at Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Nikolas Cruz, who was 19 at the time, used a semiautomatic rifle to kill 17 students and faculty members at the school. Federal law already prohibited people under age 21 from buying handguns.
Chief U.S. District Judge Mark Walker upheld the age restriction, and a three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed. But the NRA asked the full appeals court to consider the case. The court last year put the appeal on hold and directed attorneys for the state and the NRA to delay filing briefs until after the Supreme Court issued a decision in a Texas gun case known as United States v. Rahimi.
The Supreme Court’s 8-1 decision in June in the Texas case backed a ban on gun possession by people under domestic violence restraining orders and was a victory for the federal government and gun-control supporters.
Florida’s lawyers, in a brief filed Friday, said the Supreme Court held courts must “examine our ‘historical tradition of firearm regulation,’” referring to a major decision in an earlier case known as New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen.
Quoting from the Rahimi decision, the state’s brief said that previous court rulings about gun rights “were not meant to suggest a law trapped in amber,” because the Second Amendment “permits more than just those regulations identical to ones that could be found in 1791.”
The Florida law prevented the purchase of long guns by people under 21 but allowed them to use or possess them, which is “fully consistent” with the nation’s history, lawyers for Attorney General Ashley Moody’s office wrote in the brief. For example, a person under 21 could receive a gun as a gift from a relative.
“Florida’s law restricting the purchase, but not possession or use, of firearms by those under 21 is consistent with the principles that underpin our regulatory tradition. At the (nation’s) founding, individuals under 21 were considered lacking in the requisite judgment and reason to enter into contracts, which at the time were necessary to purchase firearms because such goods were bought on credit in early America’s agrarian economy. States recognized this common-law limitation when enacting their militia laws,” the brief said.
The Florida law “fits neatly within” the nation’s “historical tradition,” the state’s lawyers argued.
“The purpose of Florida’s law is the same as those historical restrictions — preventing those who the founders considered to lack capacity from purchasing firearms, while allowing parents to facilitate their possession and use,” the brief said.
In a brief filed July 31, lawyers for the NRA argued that the Rahimi decision was “narrow” and that the full appellate court should strike down the Florida law.
The Florida law does not align with the 2022 Supreme Court ruling in the Bruen case, the NRA’s lawyers argued.
“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,” John Parker Sweeney, an attorney with the Washington, D.C.-based Bradley Arant Boult Cummings LLP firm, wrote.
The “plain text” of the Second Amendment also protects young adults’ right to purchase firearms, he contended.
“The right to keep and bear arms necessarily protects the ability to acquire them, and purchase is the most common, most important, and often only available method of acquisition. Any law that hinders the exercise of Second Amendment rights, as the young adult ban does here, triggers the state’s burden to affirmatively prove a historical tradition,” the NRA brief said.
But the state repeatedly contended in Friday’s brief that history supports the Florida law.
“Taken together, the historical record demonstrates that the common law curtailed minors’ ability to purchase firearms, and the founders expressed no concern about that limitation,” Moody’s lawyers argued.
States began passing restrictions on ages to purchase guns in 1855, as guns became more powerful and more readily accessible, the state’s brief said.
The NRA’s lawsuit has drawn national attention, with friend-of-the-court briefs filed by groups advocating for stricter gun laws and states that have enacted age-based restrictions.
Also on Friday, lawyers for the Biden administration filed a brief arguing that the Supreme Court’s decision in the Rahimi case also supports the federal law barring people under age 21 from purchasing handguns.
“Federal age-based restrictions on the commercial sale of handguns comport with the Second Amendment,” U.S. Department of Justice lawyers wrote.
At the nation’s founding, state legislatures set age qualifications “for an array of important activities,” such as marriage, becoming a naturalized citizen, serving on juries and entering into enforceable contracts, the federal government’s brief said.
“These historical age restrictions reflect the framers’ view that reason and judgment are not fully developed before age 21,” the Biden administration’s lawyers wrote.
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