The judge cited the lack of gun restrictions in early America, echoing the words of hard-right Supreme Court justices.
A federal judge in Virginia ruled Wednesday that a U.S. government ban on handgun sales by federally licensed dealers to adults ages 18 to 20 violates the Second Amendment.
It’s the latest court ruling to toss out gun control measures by using the new historical test outlined in a watershed Supreme Court decision last year.
U.S. District Judge Robert Payne came down on the side of four young men who sued over the ban, writing in a 71-page opinion that “the statutes and regulations in question are not consistent with our Nation’s history and tradition” and therefore “cannot stand.”
His phrasing directly echoed the Supreme Court’s 2022 majority opinion in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, authored by Justice Clarence Thomas, which struck down a century-old New York gun control law. In Bruen, conservative justices declared that the government has to prove a gun control law “is consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”
Payne, picked by President George H.W. Bush, wrote that 18-to-20-year-olds are part of “the political community” and protected by the right to bear arms as laid out in the Constitution. He cited, among other things, founding-era militia laws and an 18th-century tome entitled “Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England.”
The government failed to show any evidence supporting “age-based restrictions on the purchase or sale of firearms from the colonial era, Founding, or Early Republic,” Payne said.
Source: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/federal-judge-18-to-20-year-olds-handguns_n_645d3fbde4b018d846bca139