The extent to which young adults have gun-carry rights will not be the next big Second Amendment question considered by the Supreme Court.
The Court on Tuesday declined a request by Pennsylvania officials to review an appeals court decision striking down the state’s ban on gun carry for adults under 21 during declared states of emergency. Instead, the justices opted to grant, vacate, and remand (GVR) that decision back to the appeals court to be re-examined with the Supreme Court’s most recent Second Amendment decision in mind.
“The petition for a writ of certiorari is granted. The judgment is vacated, and the case is remanded to the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit for further consideration in light of United States v. Rahimi,” the Court wrote.
The order did not contain any explanation or dissents from any of the justices.
The decision deals a setback to gun-rights advocates. It signals that the High Court remains highly selective about which new Second Amendment precedents it intends to set, even as outside demand for the Court to take a variety of new gun challenges continues to grow. It also, at least temporarily, allows Pennsylvania to once again deny gun carry rights to 18-20-year-olds at the discretion of the state’s Governor.
Pennsylvania law allows all adults 18 and older who are not prohibited from owning firearms to open carry in public without a permit. However, state law also bars the public from carrying firearms during a state or municipal emergency declaration. That statute provides an exemption for valid concealed carry permit holders, which can only be issued to adults aged 21 and up, leaving 18-20-year-olds without an avenue for lawful gun carry during emergency declarations.
A trio of young adults first sued the Pennsylvania State Police in October of 2020 when the state was under a state of emergency for nearly three straight years due to COVID-19, the opioid crisis, and Hurricane Ida. The suit worked its way up to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, where a divided three-judge panel in January blocked Pennsylvania from enforcing the law after finding that it violated the constitutional rights of young adults.
“The words’ the people’ in the Second Amendment presumptively encompass all adult Americans, including 18-to-20-year-olds, and we are aware of no founding-era law that supports disarming people in that age group,” Judge Kent A. Jordan wrote for the majority.
The Firearms Policy Coalition, a gun-rights group that sued Pennsylvania on behalf of the young gun owners, told The Reload it would “continue to litigate this case and work to secure the right to keep and bear arms for all peaceable adults throughout the United States.”
How the outcome of the case may change in light of Rahimi is an open question. In that case, the Court issued a narrow ruling that upheld the federal gun ban for persons subject to domestic violence restraining orders. To date, most courts confronting Second Amendment challenges in its aftermath have not seemed to change their reasoning much at all from how they handled such cases prior to Rahimi.
The Supreme Court similarly GVR’d several felon-in-possession ban cases in July to be reheard in light of Rahimi. Several of those cases have already seen the same outcomes re-affirmed by their respective appeals courts, with more likely to come.
