A federal appeals court on Tuesday ruled a Minnesota law requiring a person to be at least 21 years old before obtaining a permit to carry a handgun in public for self-defense is unconstitutional.

The St. Louis-based 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with gun rights groups in finding the state’s ban violated the rights of 18- to 20-year-olds under the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment to keep and bear arms.

U.S. Circuit Judge Duane Benton, writing for a panel of three judges all appointed by Republican presidents, held that under recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings that have expanded gun rights, the state’s 2003 law could not be deemed valid.

“Importantly, the Second Amendment’s plain text does not have an age limit,” he wrote.

The panel upheld a lower-court judge’s ruling last year in favor of the Second Amendment Foundation, the Firearms Policy Coalition and the Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus, gun rights groups which had sued alongside some of their members.

Gun rights groups have filed similar lawsuits challenging age-based restrictions on carrying firearms in other states, including in Georgia, Illinois and Pennsylvania.

Benton cited a landmark 2022 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority called New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen that changed the landscape of firearms regulation.

That ruling established a new test for assessing firearms laws, saying restrictions must be “consistent with this nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

In June, the Supreme Court in an 8-1 decision in United States v. Rahimi clarified that standard when it upheld a federal ban on people under domestic violence restraining orders from having guns, saying a modern firearms restriction did not need a “historical twin” law.

Citing that decision, Benton said a regulation disarming people who pose a credible threat to others’ physical safety could be upheld, but Minnesota had not established why 18- to 20-year-olds posed particular risks that justified its law.

A spokesperson for Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, a Democrat whose office defended the law, did not respond to a request for comment.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

U.S. Supreme Court
| Photo Credit: Reuters

The U.S. Supreme Court on June 21 upheld a federal gun control law that is intended to protect victims of domestic violence.

In their first Second Amendment case since they expanded gun rights in 2022, the justices ruled in favor of a 1994 ban on firearms for people under restraining orders to stay away from their spouses or partners. The justices reversed a ruling from the federal appeals court in New Orleans that had struck down the law.

Last week, the court overturned a Trump-era ban on bump stocks, the rapid-fire gun accessories used in the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history. The court ruled that the Justice Department exceeded its authority in imposing that ban.

Friday’s case stemmed directly from the Supreme Court’s Bruen decision in June 2022. A Texas man, Zackey Rahimi, was accused of hitting his girlfriend during an argument in a parking lot and later threatening to shoot her.

At arguments in November, some justices voiced concern that a ruling for Rahimi could also jeopardize the background check system that the Biden administration said has stopped more than 75,000 gun sales in the past 25 years based on domestic violence protective orders.

The case also had been closely watched for its potential to affect cases in which other gun ownership laws have been called into question, including in the high-profile prosecution of Hunter Biden. President Joe Biden’s son was convicted of lying on a form to buy a firearm while he was addicted to drugs. His lawyers have signaled they will appeal.

A decision to strike down the domestic violence gun law might have signaled the court’s skepticism of the other laws as well. The justices could weigh in soon in one or more of those other cases.

Many of the gun law cases grow out of the Bruen decision. That high court ruling not only expanded Americans’ gun rights under the Constitution but also changed the way courts are supposed to evaluate restrictions on firearms.

Mr. Rahimi’s case reached the Supreme Court after prosecutors appealed a ruling that threw out his conviction for possessing guns while subject to a restraining order.

Rahimi was involved in five shootings over two months in and around Arlington, Texas, U.S. Circuit Judge Cory Wilson noted. When police identified Rahimi as a suspect in the shootings and showed up at his home with a search warrant, he admitted having guns in the house and being subject to a domestic violence restraining order that prohibited gun possession, Wilson wrote.

But even though Rahimi was hardly “a model citizen,” Wilson wrote, the law at issue could not be justified by looking to history. That’s the test Justice Clarence Thomas laid out in his opinion for the court in Bruen.

The appeals court initially upheld the conviction under a balancing test that included whether the restriction enhances public safety. But the panel reversed course after Bruen. At least one district court has upheld the law since the Bruen decision.

Advocates for domestic violence victims and gun control groups had called on the court to uphold the law.

Firearms are the most common weapon used in homicides of spouses, intimate partners, children or relatives in recent years, according to data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Guns were used in more than half, 57%, of those killings in 2020, a year that saw an overall increase in domestic violence during the coronavirus pandemic.

Seventy women a month, on average, are shot and killed by intimate partners, according to the gun control group Everytown for Gun Safety.

Gun rights groups backed Rahimi, arguing that the appeals court got it right when it looked at American history and found no restriction close enough to justify the gun ban.