ON February 28th, two weeks after a 19-year-old gunman killed 17 people in Parkland, Florida, President Donald Trump said “it doesn’t make sense” for teenagers to be allowed to buy a semi-automatic weapon when federal law bans handgun sales to people under 21. Roughly 80% of Americans agree with that sentiment and, on March 14th, a nationwide student walkout urged broader action to combat gun violence. But after a talking-to in the Oval Office from a National Rifle Association (NRA) lobbyist, Mr Trump changed his tune. On March 12th he tweeted, in the face of evidence to the contrary, that there is “not much political support (to put it mildly)” for raising the age to buy rifles. Mr Trump says he prefers to wait and see how the courts handle challenges to age limits in the states.
He appears to be thinking of the conflict that is brewing in Florida, where the NRA filed a lawsuit on March 9th claiming that the Sunshine State’s new age restrictions violate the constitutional rights of 18-20-year-olds wishing to buy semi-automatic weapons. “At 18 years of age,” the complaint reads, “law-abiding citizens in this country are considered adults for almost all purposes and certainly for the purposes of the exercise of fundamental constitutional rights.” Noting that 18-year-olds “are eligible to...fight and die by arms for the country”, the NRA argues that Florida’s ban on sales to people under 21 is invalid under the Second Amendment, which protects the right to bear arms, and the 14th Amendment, which guarantees the “equal protection of the laws”.
According to Laurence Tribe, a law professor at Harvard, the NRA “should and probably will lose”. No court has found people aged 18 to 20 to be a class worthy of special constitutional protection. In 1970, when Congress turned to the 14th Amendment to justify lowering the voting age from 21 to 18 in state and local elections, the Supreme Court balked. (Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas, says this ruling, in Oregon v Mitchell, spurred the adoption of the 26th Amendment, establishing a uniform voting age of 18, a year later.) Josh Blackman, a professor at South Texas College of Law, recalls that in 2014 the Supreme Court refused to take up a challenge to a Texas law barring 18-20-year-olds from buying guns. There is no constitutional problem with considering young people to be “generally immature”, and therefore not qualified to buy guns, said the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. This ruling came from one of America’s most conservative federal appeals courts.
The NRA suit takes a peculiar turn when it claims that the ban “particularly infringes” on the gun rights of young women. “Females between the ages of 18 and 21 pose a relatively slight risk of perpetrating a school shooting” like the massacre in Parkland, the NRA observes. In 2015 they were responsible for only 1.8%
