A federal appeals court ruled Jan. 30 that a decades-old government prohibition of handgun sales by licensed firearm dealers to adults under 21 is unconstitutional in light of recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings that set a higher bar for restricting Second Amendment rights.
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a law barring federally licensed firearms dealers from selling handguns to those adults violates the Second Amendment due to the law’s incompatibility with two Supreme Court rulings known as “Bruen” and “Rahimi.”
In the Bruen decision, the Supreme Court held that a firearm regulation is unconstitutional unless the government can show that it is consistent with the nation’s historical tradition, while the Rahimi ruling largely reinforced and refined the Bruen standard for weighing restrictions to the constitutional right to bear arms….