No, Raising the Age of Gun Ownership Won’t Stop School Shootings
America is still reeling after the unspeakably tragic mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas that left 19 children dead. In the aftermath, we’re all understandably looking for answers. Yet many top Democrats are rallying around one gun control proposal that’s actually a false solution.
Their idea is simple: Raise the age to buy a gun to 21. Most school shooters are teenagers, the argument goes, and you can’t drink alcohol until age 21, so why can you buy an AR-15?
This idea is gaining training on the Left, with many Democratic politicians, progressive commentators, and even the White House throwing its weight behind the proposal.
But there are a few big reasons why this proposal is unrealistic, impractical, and ultimately unlikely to accomplish anything.
First, any law uniformly raising the age to buy a gun to 21 would face immediate constitutional challenges, and likely be stuck down as a violation of the Second Amendment. You don’t have to take my word for it: A federal appeals court just recently struck down a California law raising the age to purchase semiautomatic weapons to 21 as unconstitutional for exactly this reason, calling it a “severe burden on the core Second Amendment right of self-defense in the home.”
Think about it like this: Whether you like it or not, the Supreme Court has ruled that Americans have a constitutional right to bear arms, which differentiates this right from something like drinking alcohol. Unfortunately, the Constitution does not guarantee you the right to drink a Brewski with the boys.
And the age of legal adulthood is still 18. (Whether it should be is another question). It would obviously be unlawful and absurd to pass legislation saying that the constitutional right to free speech, for example, only kicks in at age 21. (although it would save us some headaches). As long as we consider 18-year-olds legal adults, we cannot legally or morally justify stripping them of their constitutional right to self-defense.
Any bill attempting to do so is likely doomed, especially with the current conservative Supreme Court. And any legislative solution to the rise in school shootings that won’t hold up in court isn’t a “solution” at all.
Yet even if these proposals did somehow survive constitutional scrutiny, I still don’t think raising the age to buy a gun would meaningfully reduce school shootings. Any 18, 19, or 20-year-old so disturbed that they decide to kill elementary school children is almost certainly going to be determined enough to circumvent an age limit, which, frankly, wouldn’t be that hard to do. Do high schoolers really struggle to get their hands on alcohol, after all?
It wouldn’t be particularly difficult for a determined killer to simply have someone purchase a firearm for them (like every teenager in America has done for booze). Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened in the Columbine shootings. The killers were both under 18, yet simply had someone older buy the guns they used. In many other school shootings, the killers stole the guns from an older family member.
In short, raising the age to buy a gun to 21 would not help us meaningfully reduce the frequency of these atrocities, though it would strip millions of law-abiding young adults of their right to self-defense. This isn’t just a hypothetical disadvantage; according to the Institute for Medicine, guns are used in self-defense approximately 500,000 to 3 million times per year in the U.S.
Like everything, gun control has trade-offs. By leaving law-abiding people defenseless, it can also create its own victims.
What’s more, the misguided focus on age-based gun control pulls the national attention away from more promising solutions, like reforming the way the mass media covers mass shootings. Mass shooters crave the infamy that’s granted to them by our if-it-bleeds-it-leads coverage of these atrocities, and the status quo encourages copycats—so much so that experts estimate that if we stopped plastering the names and faces of these villains and instead focused coverage on the victims, we could reduce mass shootings by up to 33 percent.
It bears repeating: We could potentially reduce mass shootings by up to one-third with simple media reforms. Unlike far-fetched and legally dubious gun control proposals, this kind of reform wouldn’t face such monumental political and constitutional hurdles.
Those who insist on trying to raise the age to buy a gun to 21 are almost certainly coming from a good place. But in reality, their efforts are worse than useless.
Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is Policy Correspondent at the Foundation for Economic Education and co-founder of BASEDPolitics.
