Georgia Supreme Court Upholds Carry Ban For Young Adults Under 21 Years Of Age

We’ve reported a number of times in recent years about the battle for Second Amendment rights for 18-, 19- and 20-year-old Americans. It seems anti-gun advocates think all the other enumerated rights in the U.S. Constitution are fine for young adults, just not the right to keep and bear arms.

In the latest court action concerning that particular subset of American adults, the Georgia Supreme Court on May 28 ruled that the state’s law banning possession or carry of firearms by adults under 21 does not violate the state’s constitution.

In the case,  20-year-old Thomas Stephens, along with gun-rights advocacy group Georgia 2^nd Amendment, sued the state to overturn the law after a probate court denied him a weapons carry license. Stephens had argued the court should overturn its rulings in past cases related to the statute, “holding that the Georgia right to keep and bear arms is subject only to a ‘reasonable exercise of police power’ test.”

The court ruling stated: “In sum, Stephens has not offered a compelling argument that the original public meaning of Paragraph VIII is meaningfully different from the construction developed through our Court’s consistent precedent addressing the language of that provision over more than a century. Because he has not established that our precedent construing this language is clearly wrong, we decline his invitation to reconsider it. And because his only argument that the statute he has challenged violates Paragraph VIII requires that we reconsider that precedent, his constitutional challenge to the statute fails.”

Incidentally, the statute in question does have some exemptions, including those under 21 who have received military training or who possess or carry handguns on their property, in their vehicle or place of  business, or for hunting, fishing or sport shooting with a license.

Of course, both laws do violate the Second Amendment, as numerous gun-rights groups have been trying to prove in court over the past several years. However, the results have been mixed.

In January 2024, a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the 3^rd Circuit, based in Philadelphia, ruled the state’s ban on adults 18-20 from carrying a handgun during an emergency to be unconstitutional under the new standards prescribed by the 2022 Supreme Court ruling in Bruen.

“We understand that a reasonable debate can be had over allowing young adults to be armed, but the issue before us is a narrow one,” U.S. Circuit Court Judge Kent A. Jordan wrote in the majority opinion. “Our question is whether the (state police) commissioner has borne his burden of proving that evidence of founding-era regulations supports Pennsylvania’s restriction on 18-to-20-year-olds’ Second Amendment rights, and the answer to that is no.”

The Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) recently filed its tenth such suit, this one challenging Connecticut’s ban on adults under 21 purchasing, owning or carrying handguns.