Application of 18 U.S.C. § 922(b)(1) and (c)(1) to Young Adults

majority opinion

(Slip Opinion)

Application of 18 U.S.C. § 922(b)(1) and (c)(1) to

Young Adults

Section 922(b)(1) and (c)(1) of title 18, U.S. Code, is unconstitutional as applied to young

adults between eighteen and twenty who seek to purchase handguns. The provision

prevents young adults, who are members of “the people” to whom the Second

Amendment applies, from owning “arms” in common use for self-defense. This places

the burden on the government to show that the restrictions are consistent with the

Nation’s tradition of firearm regulation, which it cannot do.

September 17, 2026

MEMORANDUM OPINION FOR THE ATTORNEY GENERAL

Our laws deem an eighteen-year-old “mature enough to be drafted,

vote, serve as a juror, and be sentenced to death.” 1 One such eighteenyear-old represented the United States at the Tokyo Olympics in 2020, shooting skeet.2 Yet, due to statutes predicated on concerns over an

eighteen-year-old’s ability to handle a pistol as a responsible adult, it would have been a federal felony if a licensed dealer had sold her such a firearm before she left or after she returned to her studies at the University of Texas at Arlington. See 18 U.S.C. § 922(b)(1), (c)(1). You have asked whether that restriction may be enforced against otherwise law-abiding citizens between the ages of eighteen and twenty who seek to purchase a handgun consistent with the individual right to keep and bear arms

recognized by District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008), and “fleshed out,” Wolford v. Lopez, 146 S. Ct. 2032, 2043 (2026), in New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen, 142 S. Ct. 2111 (2022). It may not. Section 922(b)(1) and (c)(1) may not be enforced to impose criminal penalties on dealers who sell handguns to a class of law-abiding adults who, in nearly every other relevant respect, are members of the political community.

1 Andrew A. Schwartz, Old Enough to Fight, Old Enough to Swipe: A Critique of the

Infancy Rule in the Federal Credit CARD Act, 2011 Utah L. Rev. 407, 432; see also U.S. Const. amend. XXVI, § 1 (right to vote); 28 U.S.C. § 1865(b)(1) (jury service); 50 U.S.C. § 3802(a) (compulsory military service); Roper v. Simmons, 543 U.S. 551, 573–74 (2005) (capital punishment).

2 See, e.g., Austen Smith, Women’s Skeet, USA Shooting, https://perma.cc/CFQ9-JWWL.

50 Op. O.L.C. __ (Sept. 17, 2026)

In 1968, Congress fundamentally altered the scope of federal firearms regulation when it enacted the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 (“OCCSSA”). See Pub. L. No. 90-351, § 901(a), 82 Stat. 197, 225–26. Even at that time, “[f]irearms and weapons control statutes

[were] by no means a legislative novelty,” as Congress had imposed gun restrictions in “[t]he late 1920s and early 1930s” due to a “growing perception of crime both as a major problem and as a national one.” David T. Hardy, The Firearms Owners’ Protection Act: A Historical and Legal

Perspective, 17 Cumb. L. Rev. 585, 589–90 (1987). The structure and

content of “the two statutes known collectively as the Gun Control Act of 1968” arose from “a complex legislative reality” where those with publicsafety concerns allied with the domestic gun-manufacturing industry in the period following World War II to limit both the importation of military arms from abroad and their sale to certain demographics. Id. at 595; see id. at 596–97.

As relevant here, Congress found that “the ease with which” handguns

could be acquired by “juveniles without the knowledge or consent of their parents or guardians . . . is a significant factor in the prevalence of lawlessness and violent crime in the United States.” OCCSSA § 901(a)(2), 82 Stat. at 225. It further concluded that there existed “a causal relationship between the easy availability of firearms other than a rifle or shotgun and juvenile and youthful criminal behavior,” and that “such firearms ha[d] been widely sold by federally licensed importers and dealers to emotionally immature[] or thrill-bent juveniles and minors prone to criminal behavior.” Id. § 901(a)(6), 82 Stat. at 225–26. A roughly contemporaneous

report from a presidential task force similarly found that “[a]rrests of juveniles for violent crimes ha[d] doubled since 1960, while their share of the population ha[d] increased only 22 percent.” Nat’l Comm’n on the

Causes and Prevention of Violence, Progress Report A-21 (1969).

In response to these statistics and findings, Congress made it “unlawful for any licensed importer, licensed manufacturer, licensed dealer, or licensed collector to sell or deliver . . . any firearm or ammunition to any individual who the licensee knows or has reasonable cause to believe is less than eighteen years of age, and, if the firearm, or ammunition is other than a shotgun or rifle, or ammunition for a shotgun or rifle, to any individual who the licensee knows or has reasonable cause to believe is less

Application of 18 U.S.C. § 922(b)(1) and (c)(1) to Young Adults

than twenty-one years of age.” 18 U.S.C. § 922(b). A companion provision prohibits a licensee from selling “any firearm other than a shotgun or rifle” to “a person who does not appear in person at the licensee’s business premises” unless the buyer furnishes a sworn statement that he is “twenty-one years or more of age.” Id. § 922(c).

The result of subsections (b)(1) and (c)(1), as well as their implementing regulations, is to effectively exclude young adults between the ages of eighteen and twenty from lawfully obtaining a handgun in the primary

firearms market, regardless of the purpose for which a young adult seeks such a firearm.3 Because section 922(b)(1) regulates licensed firearm dealers, it restricts “(A) any person engaged in the business of selling firearms at wholesale or retail, (B) any person engaged in the business of repairing firearms or of making or fitting special barrels, stocks, or trigger mechanisms to firearms, or (C) any person who is a pawnbroker.” Id.

§ 921(a)(11). Any individuals “engage[d] in the business of importing, manufacturing, or dealing in firearms” must hold a federal license. Id. § 922(a)(1)(A); see id. § 923(a). Anyone who willfully sells a firearm in violation of the age restrictions risks losing that license, id. § 923(e); 27 C.F.R. § 478.73—not to mention up to five years’ imprisonment, 18

U.S.C. § 924(a)(1). 4

3 By its terms, the federal age restrictions do not apply to individuals between the ages

of eighteen and twenty who seek to purchase “a shotgun or rifle, or ammunition for a shotgun or rifle.” 18 U.S.C. § 922(b)(1); cf. id. § 922(c)(1) (requiring a certification to purchase “any firearm other than a shotgun or rifle”). Because your question was limited to handguns, we treat as outside the scope of this opinion items such as silencers, 18 U.S.C. § 921(a)(3)(C), 26 U.S.C. § 5845(a)(7); “destructive device[s],” 18 U.S.C. § 921(a)(3)(D), 26 U.S.C. § 5845(a)(8); and large-bore weapons, 18 U.S.C. § 921(a)(4)(B), 26 U.S.C. § 5845(f ); firearm frames and receivers, 18 U.S.C. § 921(a)(3)(B); undetectable firearms, see id. § 922(p)(1); and concealable gadget-type guns designed primarily for assassination, like pen guns, see 26 U.S.C. § 5845(e).

4 For the current implementing regulations of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and

Firearms (“ATF”), see 27 C.F.R. §§ 478.96(b), 478.99(b), 478.124(a). We note that a number of those regulations are currently under reconsideration by ATF. One would formally permit parents to buy firearms for their children until their children turn twentyone. See 91 Fed. Reg. 24,448, 24,453 (proposed 27 C.F.R. § 478.105(c)(2), (d)). This regulatory change does not change our analysis, however, as it does not affect the ability of young adults to purchase weapons for themselves. Thus, we do not discuss in this opinion either it or the other regulations currently under consideration.

50 Op. O.L.C. __ (Sept. 17, 2026)

To be sure, a young adult between the ages of eighteen and twenty can, in some areas of the country, obtain a firearm in the secondary market. For example, such an adult may acquire a handgun by gift or in a private, intrastate transfer from an unlicensed seller as a matter of federal law, and parents may purchase handguns on behalf of their children who are under the age of twenty-one. See id. § 921(a)(21)(C); see also Reese v. ATF, 127 F.4th 583, 587 (5th Cir. 2025). But the practical availability of the secondary market varies considerably, and many states restrict such

private transfers. See, e.g., Cal. Penal Code § 27545; Colo. Rev. Stat. § 18-12-112; Wash. Rev. Code § 9.41.113. Recognizing that the 1968

Congress operated “under a drastically different interpretive framework” for assessing compliance with the Second Amendment, Constitutionality of 18 U.S.C. § 1715, 50 Op. O.L.C. __, at *13–14 (Jan. 15, 2026) (“Section 1715”), you have asked whether restricting young adults from buying firearms comports with the Second Amendment as the Supreme Court has

authoritatively construed it.

II.

The Second Amendment provides: “A well regulated Militia, being

necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” U.S. Const. amend. II. Like any other constitutional right, the meaning of these words is “enshrined with the scope they were understood to have when the people adopted them.” Bruen, 142 S. Ct. at 2136 (emphasis omitted) (quoting Heller, 554 U.S. at 634–35). This right “secure[s] an individual right to keep and bear arms,” Heller, 554 U.S. at 598, which extends to “the possession and use of

weapons that are ‘in common use at the time,’” including handguns, “the most popular weapon chosen by Americans for self-defense in the home,” Bruen, 142 S. Ct. at 2128 (citation omitted).

The Court has articulated “the process of historical analysis required in a Second Amendment case,” which “involves two steps.” Wolford, 146

S. Ct. at 2043. At the first, we ask whether “the Second Amendment’s

plain text covers an individual’s conduct.” Bruen, 142 S. Ct. at 2129–30. If it does, we proceed to the second step. At that stage, the regulatorytradition step, “the Constitution presumptively protects that conduct,” and the government must “justify its regulation by demonstrating that it is consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” Id.

Application of 18 U.S.C. § 922(b)(1) and (c)(1) to Young Adults

at 2130. Barring otherwise law-abiding individuals who have reached the age of majority from purchasing handguns cannot bear this scrutiny.

At the plain text step, we conclude that a bar against young adults between the ages of eighteen and twenty purchasing commonly used firearms falls squarely “within the plain text of the Second Amendment.”

Wolford, 146 S. Ct. at 2044. As the Court elaborated earlier this year, this plain-text inquiry “entails three subsidiary questions”: (1) whether the regulated party is a member of “the people”; (2) whether the regulation concerns “Arms”; and (3) whether the regulation “place[s] any restrictions on either the ‘keeping’ (i.e., possession) or the ‘bearing’ (i.e., carrying) of arms.” Id. at 2043 (alterations accepted). Our resolution of each question leads us to conclude that sections 922(b)(1) and (c)(1) are presumptively unconstitutional.

Key to your query is Wolford ’s first subsidiary question: whether

American citizens, as well as others with a sufficiently close voluntary connection to this country, who have not yet reached the age of twentyone are among “the people” whom the Second Amendment protects. We

think the better view is that they are. As we discuss below, that does not mean that every U.S. citizen, no matter his age, has a constitutional right to carry a firearm. To the contrary, history suggests otherwise. See infra Part I.A.1.c. But Bruen’s framework does not permit “smuggl[ing] additional limits, drawn from our regulatory tradition, into the plain-text stage of the inquiry,” Wolford, 146 S. Ct. at 2054 n.1 (Barrett, J., concurring), of who constitutes one of “the people.”

As the Court in Heller explained, “‘[t]he people’” is “a term of art employed in select parts of the Constitution” to “refer[] to a class of persons who are part of a national community or who have otherwise developed

sufficient connection with this country to be considered part of that community.” 554 U.S. at 580 (quoting United States v. Verdugo-Urquidez,

494 U.S. 259, 265 (1990)). And “in all six other provisions of the Consti5

50 Op. O.L.C. __ (Sept. 17, 2026)

tution that mention ‘the people,’ the term unambiguously refers to all members of the political community, not an unspecified subset.” Id.

Membership in “the people” has typically been defined by citizenship—not by age. See, e.g., Agency for Int’l Dev. v. All. for Open Soc’y Int’l, Inc., 140 S. Ct. 2082, 2086–87 (2020) (citing, inter alia, VerdugoUrquidez, 494 U.S. at 265–75). Indeed, after discussing the meaning of the phrase “right of the people,” the Court in Heller concluded that “the Second Amendment right is exercised individually and belongs to all

Americans.” 554 U.S. at 579, 581 (emphasis added).

Where age was thought to matter, the Constitution imposes express age limits. The Second Amendment does not. In particular, the Constitution sets age requirements for holding office. See U.S. Const. art. I, § 2, cl. 2 (setting the required age at twenty-five for the House); id. art. I, § 3, cl. 3 (thirty for the Senate); id. art. II, § 1, cl. 5 (thirty-five for the President). That the Framers considered age and plainly knew how to set age requirements suggests that the absence of a qualification on the right to bear arms was deliberate. Cf. U.S. Term Limits, Inc. v. Thornton, 514 U.S. 779, 793 n.9 (1995) (“[T]he Framers were well aware of the expressio unius argument that would result from their wording of the Qualifications

Clauses; they adopted that wording nonetheless.” (citing 1 Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States § 625 (3d ed.

1858))).5

A counterargument, which has been endorsed by at least one jurist, is that those under twenty-one were minors and thus not considered part of the “political community” at the Founding. See Lara v. Comm’r Pa. State Police, 125 F.4th 428, 447–51 (3d Cir. 2025) (Restrepo, J., dissenting). We do not dispute that persons under twenty-one were indeed considered minors at the Founding and were subject to legal disabilities on that account. See infra Part II.B.2.a. Those disabilities included certain limitations on their ability to assert their individual rights without the consent of their parents, as we will discuss in the next section. But the premise that

Cf. Helling v. McKinney, 509 U.S. 25, 39 (1993) (Thomas, J., dissenting) (observing that, “when members of the founding generation wished to make prison conditions a matter of constitutional guarantee, they knew how to do so”); Livingston’s Lessee v. Moore, 32 U.S. (7 Pet.) 469, 536 (1833) (“The express prohibition of ex post facto laws, meaning retrospective criminal laws, is an admission that retrospective civil laws may be made. Expressio unius exclusio est alterius.”).

Application of 18 U.S.C. § 922(b)(1) and (c)(1) to Young Adults

children have rights as part of “the people” has been established law for over a century—as we will now discuss. See, e.g., Prince v. Massachusetts, 321 U.S. 158, 166 (1944) (citing, inter alia, Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390 (1923)).

In addition to the words of the Second Amendment itself, proper interpretation of the Constitution requires looking at the Amendment in its larger constitutional context. It has long been understood that “[w]hen the same term . . . has been used” in several related constitutional provisions, “it must be understood as retaining the sense originally given to it” across all those uses. Hepburn v. Ellzey, 6 U.S. (2 Cranch) 445, 453 (1805). 6 The Court in Heller noted that “[t]he unamended Constitution and the

Bill of Rights use the phrase ‘right of the people’ two other times, in the First Amendment’s Assembly-and-Petition Clause and in the Fourth

Amendment’s Search-and-Seizure Clause.” 554 U.S. at 579. The First

Amendment secures “the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances,” U.S. Const.

amend. I, and the Fourth Amendment secures “[t]he right of the people to be secure . . . against unreasonable searches and seizures,” id. amend. IV. Both amendments protect adults under the age of twenty-one—and, with

qualifications, they protect minors. See Mahanoy Area Sch. Dist. v. Levy ex rel. B.L., 141 S. Ct. 2038, 2044–47 (2021); New Jersey v. T.L.O., 469 U.S. 325, 334 (1985).

In this instance, “the people” is a constitutional term of art that “unambiguously refers to all members of the political community.” Heller, 554 U.S. at 580. This meaning comes directly from dictionaries contemporaneous with the Constitution’s passage that define “people” as, for example, “[a] nation; these who compose a community.” 2 Samuel Johnson,

A Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed. 1773); see also Nathan

Bailey, An Universal Etymological English Dictionary (1770) (defining

6 See also, e.g., Nat’l Mut. Ins. Co. of D.C. v. Tidewater Transfer Co., 337 U.S. 582,

587 (1949) (opinion of Jackson, J.) (explaining that an interpretation is disfavored if it would introduce an “inconsistency” in the use of that word in other parts of the Constitution); accord Atlantic Cleaners & Dyers, Inc. v. United States, 286 U.S. 427, 433 (1932) (applying a similar principle in a statutory context).

50 Op. O.L.C. __ (Sept. 17, 2026)

“people” as “the whole Body of Persons who live in a Country[] or make up a Nation”). And there is no sound basis for giving the identical term a narrower understanding in the Second Amendment alone. See Heller, 554 U.S. at 579–80 (discussing the consistent meaning of “the people” across the Constitution); see also Thomas M. Cooley, The General Principles of Constitutional Law in the United States of America 267–68 (1880) (“When the term the people is made use of . . . in all the enumerations and guaranties of rights [in the Constitution,] the whole people are intended . . . .”).

Even if the concept of “the people” were tied to the age of majority, courts have consistently treated the constitutional line as eighteen rather than twenty-one. For example, the Supreme Court has recognized that the First Amendment—which also uses the term “the people”—affords the

government a measure of additional latitude to regulate speech directed at minors, but that latitude runs out when the audience in question is eighteen or older. See Free Speech Coal., Inc. v. Paxton, 145 S. Ct. 2291, 2300, 2304–08 (2025); Ginsberg v. New York, 390 U.S. 629, 638 (1968). Today at least, “the people of the several States,” U.S. Const. art. I, § 2, cl. 1, expressly includes young adults between eighteen and twenty, see infra Part II.A.1.d. And courts have at least implicitly accepted that “the people” protected by the Fourth Amendment, Verdugo-Urquidez, 494 U.S. at 265, do not include unemancipated minors, whose parents may consent to the search or seizure of their “persons, houses, papers, and effects,” U.S. Const. amend. IV.7

We have identified two primary counterarguments. First, one might

argue that, because the Court has also held that individual rights not containing the phrase “the people” apply differently to those under eighteen, those rights provide little insight into the meaning of that term. For example, the Court has held that the Fifth and Sixth Amendments are not offended by fewer procedural protections being provided to those under eighteen. See McKeiver v. Pennsylvania, 403 U.S. 528, 543–50 (1971)

(plurality opinion); United States v. Torres, 500 F.2d 944, 948–49 (2d Cir. 1974); Santana v. Collazo, 714 F.2d 1172, 1180 & n.5 (1st Cir. 1983). Yet

7 See, e.g., Dubbs v. Head Start, Inc., 336 F.3d 1194, 1207 (10th Cir. 2003)

(McConnell, J.) (holding that a physical examination performed on a minor constitutes a Fourth Amendment search “unless . . . performed with warrant or parental consent”); Thomas v. Nationwide Children’s Hosp., 882 F.3d 608, 615 (6th Cir. 2018) (Sutton, J.) (same).

Application of 18 U.S.C. § 922(b)(1) and (c)(1) to Young Adults

those Amendments nowhere mention “the people.” Nor does the Eighth

Amendment, though the Supreme Court has drawn a categorical line at

eighteen years old when determining who can receive the most severe

punishments, reasoning that “[t]he age of 18 is the point where society draws the line for many purposes between childhood and adulthood.”

Roper, 543 U.S. at 574; see also Graham v. Florida, 560 U.S. 48, 74–75 (2010); Miller v. Alabama, 567 U.S. 460, 465 (2012).8

If anything, this argument supports our primary point that membership in “the people” is not defined by age, even where our constitutional tradition allows certain rights to be limited by age. The Supreme Court has unequivocally stated that “[t]he constitutional right to bear arms in public for self-defense is not ‘a second-class right, subject to an entirely different body of rules than the other Bill of Rights guarantees.’” Bruen, 142 S. Ct. at 2156 (quoting McDonald v. City of Chicago, 561 U.S. 742, 780

(2010)). “We know of no other constitutional right that an individual may exercise only after” reaching the age of twenty-one. Id.9

Second, a critic might argue that understanding the Supreme Court to

have effectively adopted a constitutional age of majority of eighteen is problematic because Congress and state legislatures have set the age of consent for certain activities at a different age than that of majority. For example, a seventeen-year-old may enlist in the military with parental consent, see 10 U.S.C. § 505(a), but that same individual cannot drink, see 23 U.S.C. § 158(a)(1)(A); buy tobacco products, see 21 U.S.C.

§ 387f (d)(5); or gamble, see, e.g., Nev. Rev. Stat. § 463.350(1)(a); N.J. Stat. Ann. § 5:12-119(a)—that is, until he turns twenty-one. But there is no enumerated constitutional right to enlist, imbibe, inhale, or wager. As a result, policy judgments regarding the appropriate ages for such activities cannot override the Second Amendment, which “is the very product of an

In canvassing these doctrines, we do not intend to endorse or adopt their several methodologies. Roper’s reliance on evolving standards of decency, 543 U.S. at 561, in particular, is antithetical to the historical inquiry Bruen prescribes, see 142 S. Ct. at 2126, 2131–33.

9 It might be responded that history ultimately shows that the First, Second, and Fourth

Amendments do not share the same scope. But that conflates the two steps of the Bruen analysis. History may ultimately justify different regulations under different constitutional amendments, but no such differences are discernible from the Second Amendment’s plain text, which alone governs at Bruen’s step one. See Wolford, 146 S. Ct. at 2049.

50 Op. O.L.C. __ (Sept. 17, 2026)

interest balancing by the people.” Bruen, 142 S. Ct. at 2131 (emphasis in original) (quoting Heller, 554 U.S. at 635).

If anything, this variability further cuts against the age restrictions in section 922(b)(1) and (c)(1). The inconsistent treatment of young adults between eighteen and twenty belies any notion that American law embodies a settled, historically grounded judgment that persons under twenty-one are categorically dangerous or irresponsible. Where the line matters

most—emancipation from parental custody, contractual capacity, jury

service, adult criminal responsibility, full adulthood for constitutional rights, and the legal duty to bear arms for the Nation’s defense—it is drawn at eighteen. See infra Part II.B.2.a. A legislature’s preference for a higher age in unprotected domains is not a permissible basis for restricting an enumerated constitutional right. See Wolford, 146 S. Ct. at 2061 (Barrett, J., concurring).

Historical context—and particularly the Founding-era militia, referenced in the Second Amendment’s prefatory clause—confirms that

eighteen-year-olds are part of the political community. Although Heller affirmed the Second Amendment as protecting “an individual right unconnected with militia service,” 554 U.S. at 582, it acknowledged that the prefatory clause serves a “clarifying function,” id. at 578. The Heller decision also confirms that the Founding-era militia comprised “a subset of ‘the people.’” Id. at 580. If the militia was a subset of “the people” and if the Founding-era militia included those between eighteen and twenty years old, then such individuals were necessarily part of “the people” whom the Second Amendment protects. Thus, any “contemporaneous

legislative exposition,” Eldred v. Ashcroft, 537 U.S. 186, 213 (2003) (citation omitted), of the term “militia” enacted by many of the same men who framed the Bill of Rights would provide probative evidence of the original understanding of “the people” as used in the Second Amendment, cf. Heller, 554 U.S. at 596.

Founding-era legislation was nearly unanimous that the age of compulsory militia service should begin at eighteen. “Of the more than 250

militia statutes passed by the colonies and fledgling states” before and around the time of ratification, 249 of them “require[d] militia service by eighteen-to-twenty-year-olds.” George A. Mocsary, Treating Young

Application of 18 U.S.C. § 922(b)(1) and (c)(1) to Young Adults

Adults as Citizens, 27 Tex. Rev. L. & Politics 607, 624 (2023). 10 This included the Militia Act of 1792, which was enacted by the Second Congress months after the Second Amendment’s ratification, enrolled “each and every free able-bodied white male citizen” between “the age[s] of eighteen” and “forty-five,” and required that “every” enrollee “provide himself with a good musket or firelock . . . or with a good rifle.” Act of May 8, 1792, ch. 33, § 1, 1 Stat. 271, 271 (“Militia Act”).

Setting the required age for militia membership at eighteen was both

deliberate and directly tied to citizenship—that is, to being among “the people.” U.S. Const. amend. II. Secretary of War Henry Knox’s 1790

militia plan proposed that “all men of the legal military age should be armed” and that “[t]he period of life in which military service [was to] be required of the citizens of the United States [was] to commence at eighteen.” David B. Kopel & Joseph G.S. Greenlee, The Second Amendment Rights of Young Adults, 43 S. Ill. U. L.J. 495, 592 (2019) (alterations in original) (quoting 1 Annals of Cong. app. 2145–46 (Jan. 18, 1790)). In agreement, Representative James Jackson of Georgia explained on the

floor “that from eighteen to twenty-one was found to be the best age to make soldiers of.” Id. (quoting 1 Annals of Cong. at 1860 (Jan. 18,

1790)). And General George Washington, who later signed the Militia Act into law, had recommended to Alexander Hamilton that “the Citizens of America . . . from 18 to 50 Years of Age should be borne on the Militia Rolls” and be “so far accustomed to the use of [arms] that the Total

strength of the Country might be called forth at a Short Notice on any very interesting Emergency.” Id. at 593 (alterations in original) (quoting 26 The Writings of George Washington 389 (John C. Fitzpatrick ed.,

1938)).

Precisely because they were considered a subset of “the people,”

eighteen- to twenty-year-olds were not merely free to bear arms in the militia—they were required to serve and “expected to appear bearing

arms supplied by themselves and of the kind in common use at the time.” United States v. Miller, 307 U.S. 174, 179 (1939). It would be incongru10 See also Reese, 127 F.4th at 594; An Act for the Better Regulating and Training the

Militia § 3 (1755), in 6 The Statutes at Large; Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia, from the First Session of the Legislature, in the Year 1619, at 530, 531 (William Waller Hening ed., 1819) (“Virginia Statutes 1619–1792”); Kopel & Greenlee, 43 S. Ill. U. L.J. at 579.

50 Op. O.L.C. __ (Sept. 17, 2026)

ous (if not entirely self-defeating) for the Second Amendment, adopted “to prevent elimination of the militia,” Heller, 554 U.S. at 599, to exclude from its constitutional protection the very class of citizens whom every Founding-era legislature compelled to keep arms for militia service.

Two counterarguments warrant discussion. First, some have argued—

and certain jurists have agreed—that an enrollee’s duty to “provide himself ” with a musket does not imply a right to purchase one. See McCoy v. ATF, 140 F.4th 568, 578 (4th Cir. 2025); NRA v. Bondi, 133 F.4th 1108, 1118–20 (11th Cir. 2025) (en banc) (“NRA I ”). It is certainly true that a young man might borrow a family gun, receive one as a gift, or even steal one from a neighbor. Indeed, several early laws implicitly recognize as much. For example, at least half a dozen states, broadly speaking, required parents and guardians to furnish arms to minors under their care. 11 At least eleven held parents liable for militia fines, including for failure to obtain a firearm.12 And Pennsylvania and Delaware exempted “all young

11 An Act for Regulating and Governing the Militia of the Commonwealth § 20 (1793),

in 2 The Perpetual Laws of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, from the Establishment of Its Constitution in the Year 1780 to the End of the Year 1800 , at 172, 181–82 (1801); An Act for Regulating and Governing the Militia of the State § 15 (1797), in 2 The Laws of the State of Vermont, Digested and Compiled at 122, 131–32 (1808); An Act to Revise and Amend the Militia Laws § 3 (1800), in 2 The Public Acts of the General Assembly of North-Carolina at 159, 159 (Francois-Xavier Martin ed., 1804); An Act for Regulating and Governing the Militia of the Territory of Orleans § 14 (1805), in Acts Passed at the First Session of the Legislative Council of the Territory of Orleans at 202, 284–87 (1805); An Act to Organize, Govern, and Discipline the Militia of the State § 34 (1821), in An Act to Organize, Govern, and Discipline the Militia, of the State of Maine with the Several Acts in Addition Thereto at 3, 37 (1824); An Act to Organize, Govern, and Discipline the Militia § 24 (1825), in 2 Laws of the State of Missouri; Revised and Digested by Authority of the General Assembly at 533, 554 (1825).

12 An Act for Regulating and Disciplining the Militia (1777), in 9 Virginia Statutes

1619–1792, at 267, 270–71 (1821); An Act for Forming and Conducting the Military Force of the State §§ 57–58 (1792), in Acts and Laws of the State of Connecticut, in America at 298, 307–08 (1805); An Act to Organize the Militia of the State § 6 (1793), in 3 Laws of the State of New-York at 58, 63–64 (1797); An Act to Organize the Militia of the State §§ 14–15 (1798), in The Public Laws of the State of Rhode-Island and Providence Plantations at 422, 436–39 (1798); An Act to Regulate and Discipline the Militia of the State §§ 15, 20 (1798), 2 The Laws of Maryland at *444, *448–49 (William Kilty ed., 1800) (Lib. JG. no. 2, fol. 57); An Act for the Regulation of the Militia of New-Jersey § 20 (1799), in Laws of the State of New Jersey at 436, 438–40 (William Paterson ed.,

Application of 18 U.S.C. § 922(b)(1) and (c)(1) to Young Adults

men under the age of twenty-one years . . . from furnishing the necessary arms, ammunition[,] and accoutrements.” An Act for the Regulation of the Militia of the Commonwealth § 2, in 14 The Statutes at Large of Pennsylvania from 1682 to 1801, at 454, 456 (James T. Mitchell & Henry Flanders eds., 1909) (“Pennsylvania Statutes 1682–1801”); An Act for Establishing the Militia in the State § 2 (1793), in 2 Laws of the State of Delaware at 1134, 1135 (1797). Congressional debates on this topic

reflect the same expectation. When Congress debated arming the militia, Representative John Vining asked how minors “would provide themselves with the requisite” arms, to which Representative Jeremiah Wadsworth

responded that their “parents or guardians would prefer furnishing them with arms themselves.” 2 Annals of Cong. 1808–09 (Jan. 10, 1791).

We do not dispute that these parental-furnishing laws are likely the

closest thing the Founding era offers to age-specific firearms legislation. See infra Part II.B.2.a. But the manifest object of those statutes was to ensure that eighteen- to twenty-year-olds had firearms, not to keep such arms from them. And those laws operated to relieve minors of the expense of furnishing arms by supplying alternative means for such purchases.

These laws neither imply that those under twenty-one were not among

“the people,” nor did they prevent them from acquiring, possessing, or using guns. Quite the contrary, these laws not only assumed that those under twenty-one would be armed as a matter of course but ensured the means for them to arm themselves—namely, requiring parents to buy

guns for their militia-enrolled children. A legislature bent on keeping weaponry away from the hands of minors does not command their parents to arm them. Moreover, the existence of such parental-furnishing statutes goes to a different element of the Bruen analysis: assuming the applicabil1800); An Act to Provide for Organizing and Disciplining the Militia § 34 (1803), in 2 Acts of the State of Ohio: Second Session of the General Assembly at 5, 31–32 (reprt. Laning Co. 1901); An Act to Organize the Militia § 47, in The Statutes of the Mississippi Territory, Revised and Digested by the Authority of the General Assembly at 57, 80 (Harry Toulmin ed., 1807); An Act Concerning the Militia (1806), in 2 Laws of Kentucky at 401, 405 (1807); An Act to Revise and Consolidate the Militia Laws of the State § 19 (1818), in A Digest of the Laws of the State of Georgia at 324, 329–31 (Oliver H. Prince ed., 1822); An Act for the Organization and Government of the Militia of the State § 37 (1826), in Laws Passed by the Fourth General Assembly of the State of Illinois, at Their Second Session at 3, 22–23 (1826).

50 Op. O.L.C. __ (Sept. 17, 2026)

ity of the Second Amendment, whether there are historical analogues that justify limiting the right in the manner contemplated by a particular regulation. See infra Part II.B.2. They say nothing about the current question: whether Founding-era laws designed to ensure that young adults between eighteen and twenty were armed when they mustered for militia service thereby acknowledged that these young adults were “members of the

political community.” Heller, 554 U.S. at 580. They did. Cf. id. at 612 (noting that the Second Amendment protects “[t]he right of the whole

people, old and young, men, women and boys” (emphases added) (quoting Nunn v. State, 1 Ga. 243, 251 (1846))).

Second, others have pushed back on the notion that eighteen was the

universally mandated age of militia service. See McCoy, 140 F.4th at 578 & n.2. The Militia Act, the argument goes, permitted states to exempt persons from militia duty “notwithstanding their being above the age of eighteen,” Militia Act § 2, 1 Stat. at 272, and a few jurisdictions at times set the age of militia enrollment above eighteen. 13 We do not think that this contention represents the best view of the law. 14

To start, this objection confuses two concepts: the militia and the organized militia. The militia was “assumed by Article I already to be in existence” and to “consist[] of all able-bodied men” available for military

13 See McCoy, 140 F.4th at 578 & n.2 (citing An Act for Raising Levies and Recruits to

Serve in the Present Expedition Against the French, on the Ohio §§ 1–3 (1754), in 6 Virginia Statutes 1619–1792, at 438, 438–39; Act of June 2, 1779, ch. XXIV, §§ 3–4, 1779 N.J. Acts 58, 59–60; 1861 Ga. Code § 981).

14 A critic might assert that this position is inconsistent with our stated view that this

Office should not prematurely foreclose adversarial testing by issuing opinions prematurely. See Whether Eluding Inspection Under 8 U.S.C. § 1325(a)(2) Is a Continuing Offense, 49 Op. O.L.C. __, at *17–18 (June 21, 2025). Our opinion today does not foreclose litigation on this topic, as numerous states, which are not bound by our opinions, have similar age restrictions. See Cal. Penal Code § 27505; Colo. Rev. Stat. § 18-12-112(2)(e), (f ); Conn. Gen. Stat. § 29-34(b); D.C. Code § 22-4507; Del. Code tit. 24, §§ 901, 903; Fla. Stat. § 790.065(13); Haw. Rev. Stat. § 134-2(d)(1); 430 Ill. Comp. Stat. 65/4(a); Ia. Code § 724.22(1)–(2); Md. Code, Pub. Safety § 5-134(b)(1); Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 140, § 122(a); Neb. Rev. Stat. § 69-2404; N.J. Stat. § 2C:58-6.1(a); N.Y. Penal Law § 400.00; Ohio Rev. Code §§ 2923.21, 2923.211; R.I. Gen. Laws §§ 11-47-30(a), 11-47-35(a)(1), 11-47-37; Wash. Rev. Code § 9.41.240; Wyo. Stat. § 6-8-404(d). But it does serve the Executive’s independent obligation to enforce statutory law in a manner consistent with the Constitution.

Application of 18 U.S.C. § 922(b)(1) and (c)(1) to Young Adults

service. Heller, 554 U.S. at 596 (emphasis omitted). By contrast, the organized militia “may consist of a subset of the[se]” men. Id. That some states exercised their discretion to shrink their organized militias says nothing about who composed “the people” from whom the militia was

drawn, see id. at 580—just as Congress did not change the Nation’s polity when it changed the age of conscription at the outbreak of World War I, in the leadup to World War II, and in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. 15

In any event, our view is that this objection reflects an incomplete understanding of the historical record. The counterexamples on which this theory depends are either colonial provisions repealed well before the Second Amendment’s ratification or state laws enacted decades after. 16 Virginia, for example, raised its militia age in 1738 to twenty-one before returning it to eighteen in 1755, where it remained until the time of the Revolution.17 Similarly, though Pennsylvania’s 1755 militia law required parental consent until men reached the age of twenty-one, the law was superseded in 1780 by setting the minimum enrollment age at eighteen. 18 Courts likewise enforced contracts of military enlistment, whose subject matter was the bearing of arms, against persons under twenty-one, reasoning that “at the age of eighteen, a man is capable intellectually and physically of bearing arms.” United States v. Blakeney, 44 Va. (3 Gratt.) 405, 418 (1847).

15 See Pub. L. No. 65-12, § 2, 40 Stat. 76, 77–78 (1917) (setting the age of conscription

at twenty-one); Pub. L. No. 65-210, § 3, 40 Stat. 955, 955–56 (1918) (lowering it to eighteen); Pub. L. No. 76-783, § 2, 54 Stat. 885, 885 (1940) (raising it back to twentyone); Pub. L. No. 77-360, § 1, 55 Stat. 844, 844 (1941) (lowering it back to eighteen).

16 See, e.g., An Act to Exempt Minors from Militia Duty in Time of Peace §§ 1–2

(1829), in A Compilation of the Public Laws of the State of New-Jersey, Passed Since the Revision in the Year 1820, at 266, 266 (Josiah Harrison ed., 1833); An Act to Regulate the Militia §§ 2, 14 (1844), in Acts of a General Nature, Passed by the Forty Second General Assembly of the State of Ohio at 53, 53, 55 (1844); Kan. Const. of 1859, art. 8, § 1.

17 See An Act for the Better Regulation of the Militia § 2 (1738), in 5 Virginia Statutes

1619–1792, at 16, 16 (1819); An Act for the Better Regulating and Training the Militia § 3 (1755), in 6 Virginia Statutes 1619–1792, at 530, 531.

18 See An Act for the Better Ordering and Regulating Such as Are Willing and Desirous to Be United for Military Purposes Within this Province § 2 (1755), in 5 Pennsylvania Statutes 1682–1801, at 197, 200 (1898); An Act for the Regulation of the Militia of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania § 3 (1780), in 10 Pennsylvania Statutes 1682–1801, at 144, 145–46 (1904).

50 Op. O.L.C. __ (Sept. 17, 2026)

Even outside militia service, persons under twenty-one had obligations as citizens that contemplated them carrying arms. For example, they could typically be summoned from ages fifteen or sixteen to join the posse

comitatus—the corps of able-bodied men whom the sheriff could summon

to assist in enforcing the law, keeping the peace, and pursuing felons— and directed to bring “such arms or weapons as they have or can provide.” Kopel & Greenlee, 43 S. Ill. U. L.J. at 533–34 & n.253 (citation omitted). This obligation descended directly from the Statute of Winchester, 19 which was passed in England during the thirteenth century and required men aged fifteen to sixty to keep arms according to their means. See id. at 533–35 & n.247. 20

Revolutionary-era loyalty statutes adopted by a subset of states point the same way. They provided for the disarmament of teenagers who

refused to swear allegiance to the new Nation. 21 If teenagers were, however, not generally able to carry arms, such a sanction would have had little teeth. See Robert H. Churchill, Gun Regulation, the Police Power, and the Right to Keep Arms in Early America: The Legal Context of the Second Amendment, 25 Law & Hist. Rev. 139, 159 (2007).

Ordinary practice matched the law. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, advised his fifteen-year-old nephew to “[l]et your gun . . . be the constant

19 13 Edw. 1 c. 6 (1285) (Eng.) (repealed 1623).

20 We review this evidence for the limited purpose of confirming that those under

twenty-one were within “the people” at Bruen’s first step. Though not the issue before us today, we note here that, as we discuss in Part II.B.2, infra, our Nation’s historical tradition of regulating firearm purchases by legal minors likely supports such modern regulations under Bruen’s second step. Inclusion within “the people” begins the inquiry but does not end it.

21 In Pennsylvania and Maryland, the statutes applied to individuals above eighteen.

See An Act, Obliging the Male White Inhabitants of this State to Give Assurances of Allegiance to the Same, and for Other Purposes Therein Mentioned §§ 1–2, 4 (1777), in 9 Pennsylvania Statutes1682–1801, at 110, 111 (1903); An Act for the Better Security of the Government § 2 (1777), in Laws of Maryland Made Since 1763, at *184, *184 (Alexander C. Hanson ed., 1787). In Massachusetts and Virginia, they reached all the way down to those above the age of sixteen. See An Act Recommending the Disarming of Such Persons as Are Notoriously Disaffected to the Cause of America §§ 1–3 (1776), in 5 The Acts and Resolves, Public and Private, of the Province of the Massachusetts Bay at 479, 479–81 (1886); An Act to Oblige the Free Male Inhabitants of this State Above a Certain Age to Give Assurance of Allegiance to the Same, and for Other Purposes (1777), in 9 Virginia Statutes 1619–1792, at 281, 281–82.

Application of 18 U.S.C. § 922(b)(1) and (c)(1) to Young Adults

companion of your walks.” Kopel & Greenlee, 43 S. Ill. U. L.J. at 532 (quoting Thomas Jefferson, Writings 816–17 (Merrill D. Peterson ed.,

1984)). And a twenty-year-old Andrew Jackson “arm[ed] himself with a

rifle and a good pair of pistols” for his journey west in the winter of 1787–88. Hendrik Booraem, Young Hickory: The Making of Andrew

Jackson 195 (2001). And an eighteen-year-old Davy Crockett bought

himself a rifle that he “generally carried . . . with [him] whereever [he] went.” David Crockett, A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett, of the State of Tennessee 50–51 (1834) (“The Life of David Crockett”). Neither Crockett nor his contemporaries appear to have treated an eighteen-yearold’s firearm purchase as remarkable, much less unlawful.

If the Second Amendment’s text and history left doubt whether young

adults between the ages of eighteen and twenty were free to exercise

their constitutional rights without adult supervision, the Twenty-Sixth Amendment eliminated any such uncertainty in 1971. The Twenty-Sixth

Amendment provides: “The right of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of age.” U.S. Const.

amend. XXVI, § 1. This language reflects a considered constitutional

judgment that eighteen-year-olds are full members of the Nation’s political community. Cf. Steven G. Calabresi & Julia T. Rickert, Originalism and Sex Discrimination, 90 Tex. L. Rev. 1, 66–70 (2011) (arguing that later amendments may inform the application of earlier constitutional text); Branch v. Smith, 538 U.S. 254, 281 (2003) (plurality opinion) (“[I]t is, of course, the most rudimentary rule of statutory construction . . . that courts do not interpret statutes in isolation, but in the context of the corpus juris of which they are a part, including later-enacted statutes . . . .”).

Ratified in just over three months—the fastest ratification of any

amendment—between March and July of 1971, during the most intense

fighting in the Vietnam War, the Twenty-Sixth Amendment was adopted

against the backdrop of ongoing conscription and the related perception of injustice in requiring eighteen-year-olds to fight and die for their country while denying them the vote. See Vivian E. Hamilton, Adulthood in Law and Culture, 91 Tul. L. Rev. 55, 64–65 (2016). “Once eighteen had become the age of conscription and of the franchise, it began to replace

50 Op. O.L.C. __ (Sept. 17, 2026)

twenty-one across a range of contexts and has been adopted as the near universal age of majority.” Id. at 65.

It would be incongruous to require eighteen- to twenty-year-olds to

register for selective service and stand ready to carry arms in the Nation’s defense, see 50 U.S.C. § 3802(a), while denying them the core

Second Amendment right to bear arms in self-defense. Whatever force

the common-law infancy doctrine might once have had, “[r]eading the

Second Amendment in the context of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment

unambiguously places 18 to 20-year-olds within the national political community” today. Worth v. Jacobson, 108 F.4th 677, 691 (8th Cir.

2024).

In the Anglo-American political tradition, the franchise has long kept company with other attributes of full civic membership. “At the Founding, the right of the people to keep and bear arms stood shoulder to shoulder with the right to vote; arms bearing in militias embodied a paradigmatic political right flanking the other main political rights of voting, office holding, and jury service.” Akhil Reed Amar, The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction 258 (1998) (“Amar, Creation and Reconstruction”)

(emphasis in original); see also Akhil Reed Amar, The Bill of Rights as a Constitution, 100 Yale L.J. 1131, 1164 n.152 (1991) (“[A]rms-bearing

and suffrage were intimately linked 200 years ago and have remained so for two centuries.”); Churchill, 25 Law & Hist. Rev. at 159 (noting the Founding generation “attempt[ed] to preserve the connection between the right to keep arms and membership in the body politic”). Federal firearms law continues to reflect that connection. In determining whether a person’s “civil rights” have been “restored” and thus a federal firearms disability lifted, 18 U.S.C. § 921(a)(20), courts look principally to the restoration of “the rights to vote, hold office, and serve on a jury,” Logan v. United States, 552 U.S. 23, 28 (2007); see also Caron v. United States, 524 U.S. 308, 316 (1998).

Eligibility for jury service likewise has historically tracked the voting age. See generally Vikram David Amar, Jury Service as Political Participation Akin to Voting, 80 Cornell L. Rev. 203, 203–05 (1995). Within a year of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment’s adoption, Congress lowered the

minimum age for federal jury service to eighteen. See Pub. L. No. 92-269, § 1, 86 Stat. 117, 117 (1972) (codified at 28 U.S.C. § 1865(b)(1)). A majority of states promptly followed suit, with most tying their jury-pool

Application of 18 U.S.C. § 922(b)(1) and (c)(1) to Young Adults

qualification requirements to voter-registration rolls. See, e.g., Tex. Gov’t Code § 62.001(a)(1); N.Y. Jud. Law § 506; Va. Code § 8.01-345.

It would be anomalous for restoration of the franchise and the ability to serve on juries to serve as the statutory touchstones of arms eligibility while the constitutional enfranchisement of eighteen-year-olds counted for nothing.22

To be sure, a few states retain higher ages of majority for some purposes as a matter of state law, including eligibility for jury service. See infra Part II.B.2.a; see also, e.g., Ala. Code § 12-16-60(a)(1) (setting jury eligibility at nineteen); Neb. Rev. Stat. § 25-1601 (same); Miss. Code § 13-5-1 (setting jury eligibility at twenty-one); Mo. Rev. Stat. § 494.425(1) (same). But the Twenty-Sixth Amendment fixes eighteen as the constitutional

threshold of full political membership, and the Nation’s prompt, nearuniversal legislative migration to eighteen as the age of majority confirms a constitutional standard that has been ratified. Cf. Chiafalo v. Washington, 140 S. Ct. 2316, 2326 (2020); Bruen, 142 S. Ct. at 2161–62 (Kavanaugh, J., concurring).

A critic might suggest that this is fair-weather originalism, because we are not treating membership in the political community as having been fixed by eighteenth-century conceptual boundaries. For the reasons discussed above, we think this objection is incorrect as many individuals between eighteen and twenty carried arms in the eighteenth century. See supra Part II.A.1.c. Even assuming “the people” was defined entirely by the franchise, this is one area where “the people” have consciously chosen to expand admission into their ranks. Put another way, in 1791, “the

people” as defined by the vote consisted largely of white, landed men. Property qualifications for voting were later removed on a state-by-state

22 To be clear, by canvassing these principles, we do not mean to suggest that “the

Second Amendment protects a purely civic right”—that is, “a right that was exercised for the benefit of the community (like voting and jury service).” Kanter v. Barr, 919 F.3d 437, 462–63 (7th Cir. 2019) (Barrett, J., dissenting), abrogated by Bruen, 142 S. Ct. 2111. We fully agree with the Supreme Court that the Second Amendment “confer[s] an individual right” rooted in self-defense. Heller, 554 U.S. at 595 (emphasis added); see also id. at 599. We merely cite these principles for the guidance they provide regarding what it means to extend that right to “all members of the political community,” not merely to “an unspecified subset.” Id. at 580 (emphasis added).

50 Op. O.L.C. __ (Sept. 17, 2026)

basis by 1856. 23 Racial exclusions were removed in 1870, see U.S. Const. amend. XV; sex-based exclusions in 1920, see id. amend. XIX; and financial exclusions were removed in 1964, see id. amend. XXIV. No one

supposes that any of those groups may today be excluded from the Second Amendment on any of these grounds. Reconstruction “recast arms bearing as a core civil right” that belonged to “[e]veryone—even nonvoting,

nonmilitia-serving women.” Amar, Creation and Reconstruction at 258–

59 (emphasis omitted). The same holds true for eighteen- to twenty-yearolds, who today can vote, serve on juries, hold many civil offices, or bind themselves by contract.

A riposte might be that if we are going to count later expansions of “the people,” including later constitutional amendments, we have to consider the regulatory tradition that existed at the time of such later amendments. And because the Gun Control Act of 1968 was enacted just three years

before the Twenty-Sixth Amendment’s adoption, such argument would

go, section 922(b)(1) and (c)(1) is part of—not antithetical to—the Nation’s tradition of firearms regulations. See supra Part II.A.1.d. Again, we are unpersuaded for a number of reasons—not least of which is that it raises a Bruen step two objection to Bruen step one proposition.

Where the Constitution does not define a term, the term “must be interpreted ‘by reference to historical practices and understandings’” present at the time of ratification. Town of Greece v. Galloway, 572 U.S. 565, 576 (2014) (quoting County of Allegheny v. ACLU, Greater Pittsburgh Chapter, 492 U.S. 573, 670 (1989) (Kennedy, J., concurring in the judgment in part and dissenting in part)). This includes other times the same term is used in the Constitution and “the effect attributed to them before the [relevant] Amendment was adopted.” Eisner v. Macomber, 252 U.S. 189,

205 (1920); see Brushaber v. Union Pac. R.R. Co., 240 U.S. 1, 17–18

(1916); cf. Antonin Scalia & Bryan A. Garner, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts 322–26 (2012) (discussing the prior-construction canon in a statutory context). This rule has been applied specifically in the Twenty-Sixth Amendment context to elucidate the meaning of terms like

23 Talia Lakritz, Grace Panetta & Olivia Reaney, The 19th Amendment Passed 100

Years Ago Today. The Evolution of American Voting Rights in 244 Years Shows How Far We’ve Come—and How Far We Still Have to Go, Bus. Insider (Aug. 18, 2020), https:// perma.cc/25TG-MZ4Y.

Application of 18 U.S.C. § 922(b)(1) and (c)(1) to Young Adults

“abridge” and “the right to vote.” See Grant v. Belangia, __ F.4th ___, ___, 2026 WL 2409681 (4th Cir. Aug. 18, 2026) (slip op. at *5–6); Tex. Dem. Party v. Abbott, 978 F.3d 168, 184–85 (5th Cir. 2020); Tully v.

Okeson, 977 F.3d 608, 614 (7th Cir. 2020).

But the premise does not hold as a rebuttal during Bruen’s step one

here because the question put to voters in 1971 was, at most, the meaning of “the people”—not the meaning of “to keep and bear arms.” Put another way, the canon on which this premise is based itself hinges on presumptions of how Congress would have understood the meaning of words it

adopted. See Scalia & Garner at 323–24. Neither the voting-rights

amendments (which have arguably expanded the meaning of “the people,” see supra Part II.A.1.d) nor the Fourteenth Amendment (which has been held to incorporate the Second Amendment against the states, see

McDonald, 561 U.S. at 787–88 (plurality opinion)) uses the phrase “right to keep and bear arms.” See U.S. Const. amends. XIV, XV, XIX, XXIV,

XXVI. Thus, neither what those words meant nor how they interacted

with the Gun Control Act—or any other gun-control statute for that matter—was before the Congress that proposed or the voters who ratified the Twenty-Sixth Amendment. Consequently, the Gun Control Act cannot

count as part of the Nation’s regulatory tradition, even though it was enacted around the time of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment.

Even if Bruen were to allow us to mix and match the plain-text and

historical-tradition aspects of its framework, the Supreme Court has

already held that the meaning of the Second Amendment right did not

change when subsequent amendments to the Constitution extended its

applicability to new contexts. Although acknowledging the existence of an “ongoing scholarly debate” about the extent to which 1868 provides a relevant baseline for understanding the scope of the right, United States v. Rahimi, 144 S. Ct. 1889, 1898 n.1 (2024) (citation omitted), the Court has “generally assumed that the scope” of the Amendment “is pegged to the public understanding of the right when the Bill of Rights was adopted in 1791,” Bruen, 142 S. Ct. at 2137. That is, subsequent amendments to the Constitution may have expanded—or, at least, clarified—who enjoyed the right to keep and bear arms, but they do not affect what that right entails. Cf. Wolford, 146 S. Ct. at 2053 (“[A] lone statute adopted nearly a century after the adoption of the Second Amendment and well after the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment sheds little if any light on the meaning of the Second Amendment right.”).

50 Op. O.L.C. __ (Sept. 17, 2026)

In hewing to the original understanding of the Second Amendment in

1791, the Court ensured that “the Second Amendment has the same meaning in all parts of,” and thus to all “the people” of, “the United States.” Wolford, 146 S. Ct. at 2050. It would be particularly anomalous to adopt a different rule here given that Congress has acknowledged that when it comes to the possession of a firearm—as opposed to the purchase of

one—“18 years of age” is old enough to be considered an adult. 18 U.S.C. § 922(x)(5).

For many of these reasons, even courts that have upheld age-based restrictions on firearm purchases have readily concluded (or assumed) that “ordinary, law-abiding citizen[s] under the age of 21 . . . [are] part of ‘the people’ as defined by the Second Amendment.” Rocky Mountain Gun

Owners v. Polis, 121 F.4th 96, 116 (10th Cir. 2024); see, e.g., McCoy, 140 F.4th at 575; NRA I, 133 F.4th at 1130. Thus, we can turn to the remaining elements of the Bruen framework’s first step to determine whether section 922(b)(1) and (c)(1) fall squarely “within the plain text of the Second Amendment.” Wolford, 146 S. Ct. at 2044.

The second of Bruen’s subsidiary questions—whether the restrictions at issue concern “any form of ‘Arms,’” id. at 2043—is quite straightforward. At the Founding, as today, “arms” meant “weapons of offence, or armour of defence,” or “any thing that a man wears for his defence, or takes into his hands, or useth in wrath to cast at or strike another.” Heller, 554 U.S. at 581 (alteration accepted) (citations omitted). And at the Founding, as today, “all firearms constituted ‘arms.’” Id. (citation omitted).

To be sure, the Supreme Court has explained that “the Second Amendment protects only the carrying of weapons that are those ‘in common use at the time,’ as opposed to those that ‘are highly unusual in society at large.’” Bruen, 142 S. Ct. at 2143 (quoting Heller, 554 U.S. at 627). Jurists have debated whether that common-use test should be applied at the plain-text step or the regulatory-tradition step of the Bruen inquiry. See, e.g., Bevis v. City of Naperville, 85 F.4th 1175, 1198 (7th Cir. 2023) (“There is no consensus on whether the common-use issue belongs at

Bruen step one or Bruen step two.”). Because our analysis does not turn on that point, we assume for present purposes that the common-use test applies at the first step.

Application of 18 U.S.C. § 922(b)(1) and (c)(1) to Young Adults

The federal age restrictions at issue here concern “any firearm” “other than a shotgun or rifle.” 18 U.S.C. § 922(b)(1), (c)(1). This could undoubtedly include a range of weaponry that falls within the definition of firearms but outside the protections of the Second Amendment—such as a

bazooka or howitzer. See id. § 921(a)(3)–(4). But your question was

limited to handguns. See supra note 3. Because handguns are “the most popular weapon chosen by Americans for self-defense in the home,”

Heller, 554 U.S. at 629, the proscriptions of section 922(b)(1) and (c)(1) indisputably extend to “weapons ‘in common use’ today,” Bruen, 142

S. Ct. at 2134 (quoting Heller, 554 U.S. at 627).

The application of Bruen’s third “subsidiary question[]”—whether the

regulation restricts the “keeping” or “bearing” of the arms in common use—is only slightly more complex. Wolford, 146 S. Ct. at 2043 (alterations accepted). As the Supreme Court explained earlier this year, “keeping” a firearm is synonymous with “possession,” and “bearing” with

“carrying.” Id. (alterations accepted). Moreover, although neither subsection (b)(1) nor subsection (c)(1) of section 922 specifically refers to the possession or carrying of a firearm, the Court made clear that “because that right was not in every way coterminous with the Amendment’s literal language, further analysis may be needed” into the purpose and function of a law as it is evidenced by “the historical understanding of the codified right.” Id. at 2044.

Subsections (b)(1) and (c)(1) of 18 U.S.C. § 922 restrict the keeping and bearing of arms. As we explained recently in the context of a different restriction on the ability to access firearms, “[c]onstitutional rights ‘implicitly protect those closely related acts necessary to their exercise.’” Section 1715 at *6 (quoting Luis v. United States, 578 U.S. 5, 26 (2016) (Thomas, J., concurring in the judgment)). For this reason, we have concluded that “the receipt of a weapon is almost always a necessary predicate to both keeping and bearing a weapon.” Id. (emphasis in original). And we agree with the majority of circuit courts, which have held that “the right to ‘keep and bear arms’ surely implies the right to purchase them.” Reese, 127 F.4th at 590 & n.2; see also, e.g., United States v. Knipp, 138 F.4th 429, 435 (6th Cir. 2025); Yukutake v. Lopez, 130 F.4th 1077, 1090 (9th Cir.), vacated on reh’g en banc, 144 F.4th 1119 (2025). After all,

50 Op. O.L.C. __ (Sept. 17, 2026)

“the right to keep and bear arms for self-defense ‘wouldn’t mean much’ without the ability to acquire arms.” Teixeira v. County of Alameda, 873 F.3d 670, 677 (9th Cir. 2017) (en banc) (citation omitted); see also Andrews v. State, 50 Tenn. 165, 178 (1871) (“The right to keep arms, necessarily involves the right to purchase them . . . .”).

The fact that section 922(b)(1) penalizes the dealer rather than the buyer does not change our conclusion. The Second Amendment’s operative command confirms the point: The right to bear arms “shall not be infringed.” U.S. Const. amend. II. Dictionaries contemporary to the Amendment’s

passage defined “infringe” to encompass hindrance of a right, not merely its outright destruction.24 A prohibition that operates on sellers so as to close the primary market to a class of buyers hinders those buyers’ rights just as a prohibition addressed to the buyers themselves would. If a flat ban on selling to a subset of “the people” evades the Second Amendment simply because it operates through the regulation of dealers, then “step by step, other limitations on sales could easily displace the right altogether.” Reese, 127 F.4th at 590.

One counterargument is that because the restrictions reach “only transactions involving firearms,” they do “not prohibit anyone from owning, possessing, or using firearms.” McCoy, 140 F.4th at 572 (emphasis in

original); see 18 U.S.C. § 922(b), (c). But, as we recently observed, the “right to ‘keep and bear’ arms . . . would be meaningless if the government could prevent citizens from ever receiving such arms,” since “the receipt of a weapon is almost always a necessary predicate to both keeping and bearing a weapon.” Section 1715 at *6 (emphasis in original).

A second, related counterargument is that because the regulations reach “only the commercial sale of firearms,” they leave other avenues for the receipt of firearms untouched—for example, gifts and private sales remain available. McCoy, 140 F.4th at 572–72 (emphasis in original) (citing 18

24 See 1 Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (1st ed. 1755) (defining “infringe” as “[t]o violate” and “[t]o destroy; to hinder” and, in turn, defining “hinder” as “[t]o obstruct” and “to impede”); 1 Noah Webster, An American Dictionary of the English Language 100, 109 (1828) (similarly defining “infringe” and defining “hinder” as “[t]o interpose obstacles or impediments”); accord Nunn, 1 Ga. at 251 (“The right of the whole people, old and young, men, women and boys . . . to keep and bear arms . . . shall not be infringed, curtailed, or broken in upon, in the smallest degree” (first and last emphases added)).

Application of 18 U.S.C. § 922(b)(1) and (c)(1) to Young Adults

U.S.C. § 923(a)); see also 18 U.S.C. §§ 921(21)(C), 922(b)(1) (defining commercial sellers and their licensing requirements). This argument

depends on channels for obtaining a firearm that may not exist for some members of the affected population. That is, “[n]ot all young adults have friends or family members who are able or willing to gift them a gun,” and “secondary markets are not always available to everyone or easy to navigate safely” and do not “come with assurances of quality, safety, [and] legality” that accompany licensed dealers. Hirschfeld v. ATF,

5 F.4th 407, 417 (4th Cir. 2021), vacated as moot, 14 F.4th 322 (4th Cir. 2021). Even if those channels do exist, their existence merely goes to the severity of the burden, not whether the Second Amendment right is implicated at all.25 No one would doubt, for instance, that a law barring adults under twenty-one from purchasing books from commercial entities implicates the First Amendment, even though public libraries, birthday

gifts, and curbside boxes of books labeled “free” remained available. Cf. Carlton F.W. Larson, Four Exceptions in Search of a Theory: District of Columbia v. Heller and Judicial Ipse Dixit, 60 Hastings L.J. 1371, 1385 (2009). And if they did, such doubt could not carry the day here because the Court has held that the Second Amendment does not incorporate the type of “means-ends scrutiny” that pervades First Amendment doctrine. Bruen, 142 S. Ct. at 2125–26.

In rejecting this conclusion, we are (of course) aware that the Court stated that nothing in its Heller opinion “should be taken to cast doubt on . . . laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.” 554 U.S. at 626–27; see also Rocky Mountain Gun Owners, 121

F.4th at 119–20.26 But we are also cognizant of the Court’s direction that its opinions are “not always to be parsed as though we were dealing with

25 Neither Heller nor Bruen involved total deprivations. The statute in Heller concerned handguns and, much like the federal age restrictions, did not apply to other firearms. 554 U.S. at 628. The Court nonetheless held that “[i]t is no answer to say, as petitioners do, that it is permissible to ban the possession of handguns so long as the possession of other firearms (i.e., long guns) is allowed.” Id. at 629. And Bruen concerned a may-issue licensing regime rather than a categorical ban; yet the Supreme Court found that those restrictions implicated the Second Amendment and proceeded to the second step of its analysis. 142 S. Ct. at 2122, 2124–25, 2135–36.

26 This “assurance[]” was repeated in the Court’s plurality opinion in McDonald, 561

U.S. at 786, and in concurrences in Bruen, 142 S. Ct. at 2162 (Kavanaugh, J., concurring), and Rahimi, 144 S. Ct. at 1923 (Kavanaugh, J., concurring).

50 Op. O.L.C. __ (Sept. 17, 2026)

the language of a statute.” Nat’l Pork Producers Council v. Ross, 143 S. Ct. 1142, 1155 (2023) (quoting Reiter v. Sonotone Corp., 442 U.S. 330, 341 (1979)); Application of 18 U.S.C. § 930(a) to Post Offices, 50 Op. O.L.C. __, at *17 (Aug. 12, 2026) (“Post Offices”). This language in

Heller was dicta announced without citation or supporting analysis, see, e.g., Larson, 60 Hastings L.J. at 1372; see also Heller, 554 U.S. at 721 (Breyer, J., dissenting) (observing that this list of exceptions “fails to cite any colonial analogues”). Although not to be “idly ignore[d],” Off. Comm. of Unsecured Creditors of Cybergenics Corp. v. Chinery, 330 F.3d 548, 561 (3d Cir. 2003) (en banc) (citation omitted), such an aside “settles nothing, even in the court that utters it,” Jama v. ICE, 543 U.S. 335, 351 n.12 (2005). We are particularly reluctant to overread any statements from Heller when the Court itself has acknowledged that it only later “fleshed out the process of historical analysis required in a Second Amendment case.” Wolford, 146 S. Ct. at 2043. Thus, for guidance regarding how to apply Heller, we look to these later cases.

On closer inspection, Heller’s reference to lawful commercial regulation is a question of historical tradition, and such questions are entirely “out of place at Bruen’s first step.” Id. at 2049; see id. at 2054 & n.1 (Barrett, J., concurring). That is, Heller treated the historical-tradition question as bearing on whether the Second Amendment was implicated by a regulation, but the Court clarified in Bruen clarified that the question is better understood as determining whether the Second Amendment is

violated by a regulation. 142 S. Ct. at 2133–34. Indeed, even Heller’s dictum describes laws conditioning commercial sales as only “presumptively lawful.” 554 U.S. at 627 n.26 (emphasis added). Presumptions can be overcome. Cf. United States v. Hemani, 146 S. Ct. 1677, 1685 (2026) (explaining how the government can “overcome th[e] presumption” that

certain firearms regulations are unconstitutional). It would make little sense to suggest one could overcome a presumption that a law is consistent with a constitutional provision which the law in question does not even implicate.

* * *

In sum, because the federal age restrictions burden the ability of members of “the people” to obtain—and, by extension, to possess and to

carry—the very type of weapon that is most commonly used in self26

Application of 18 U.S.C. § 922(b)(1) and (c)(1) to Young Adults

defense, those restrictions regulate conduct covered by the Second

Amendment’s plain text. Wolford, 146 S. Ct. at 2043–44. Thus, they are “presumptively unconstitutional.” Id. at 2044.

Next, using a number of different analogues, we must consider whether the government can carry its burden of demonstrating that the restrictions are “consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” Bruen, 142 S. Ct. at 2130. We do not think it can.

When evaluating whether a law is consistent with our Nation’s historical tradition of firearms regulation, we begin by considering whether that law “addresses a general societal problem that has persisted since [the Founding].” Id. at 2131. If such a problem is apparent but we are unable to find “a distinctly similar historical regulation addressing that problem,” the “lack” of such a historical regulation is “evidence that the challenged regulation is inconsistent with the Second Amendment.” Id. “Likewise, if earlier generations addressed the societal problem, but did so through materially different means, that also could be evidence that a modern regulation is unconstitutional.” Id.; see also Post Offices at *12–13. That is precisely the case here.

Although we have no reason to doubt Congress’s conclusion that the

number of young adults arrested for violent crime increased significantly in the 1960s, see S. Rep. No. 90-1097, at 76–77 (1968), it is equally clear that youthful immaturity was known of at the Founding. Thomas Jefferson compared those under twenty-one to “maniacs,” “drunkards,” and others who “cannot take care of themselves.” Letter for Samuel Smith, from

Thomas Jefferson (May 3, 1823), https://perma.cc/YD6X-H6PN. Less

colorfully, John Adams warned they were not “fit to be trusted by the Public,” due to their lack of “Judgment or Will,” and opposed extending them the right to vote. Letter for James Sullivan, from John Adams

(May 26, 1776), https://perma.cc/HW9M-7YL2. And Gouverneur Morris

argued at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 that minors “want prudence” and “have no will of their own.” 4 The Writings of James Madison 119 (Gaillard Hunt ed., 1903).

50 Op. O.L.C. __ (Sept. 17, 2026)

The Founding generation was no stranger to armed violence, including

by the young. Although no official crime statistics exist for the period, historians reconstructing homicide rates from surviving records have

found that “homicide was all too common” in many places during the

colonial and Founding periods and that “high homicide rates were sometimes associated with high levels of gun violence.” Randolph Roth, Guns, Gun Culture, and Homicide: The Relationship Between Firearms, the Uses of Firearms, and Interpersonal Violence, 59 Wm. & Mary Q. 223, 234

(2002);27 cf. 4 Blackstone at 23–24 (discussing examples of children tried and executed for violent felonies including murder and arson). The era’s surety and “going armed” regimes existed precisely to address such firearm violence. See Rahimi, 144 S. Ct. at 1899–901. And dueling claimed young lives throughout the era—such as Alexander Hamilton’s son Philip, who was famously killed in a duel at the age of nineteen in 1801. See Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton 650–54 (2004).

Nevertheless, “the Founding era lacked express prohibitions on the purchase of firearms” by those between eighteen and twenty, as even the

decisions upholding such restrictions have acknowledged. NRA I, 133

F.4th at 1124. Indeed, far from banning youths from owning firearms, the Founding generation did the opposite: The Militia Act required males

eighteen and older to enroll and to furnish their own weapons, and nearly every state’s militia law did the same. See supra Part II.A.1.c. Punishing violent crime remained primarily in the hands of the states, which—unlike Congress—possess a police power. 28 And the states responded to violent

27 New England, for example, “had an elevated homicide rate during the American

Revolution,” with “70 percent of known adult homicides and probable homicides in Vermont” between 1760 and 1790 “committed with guns.” Roth, 59 Wm. & Mary Q. at 236. Farther south, “the homicide rate soared during and after the Revolution” as “firearms became a preferred means of ambushing adversaries.” Id. In Franklin County, Georgia, for example, “58 percent of the known adult homicides that occurred between 1800 and 1830 were committed with guns.” Id.

28 See Bond v. United States, 572 U.S. 844, 854 (2014) (“In our federal system, the . . .

States have broad authority to enact legislation for the public good—what we have often called a ‘police power.’ The Federal Government, by contrast, has no such authority and ‘can exercise only the powers granted to it . . . .’” (citation omitted) (quoting, inter alia, M‘Culloch v. Maryland, 17 U.S. (4 Wheat.) 316, 405 (1819))); United States v. Lopez, 514 U.S. 549, 567 (1995) (emphasizing that “congressional authority” does not extend “to a general police power of the sort retained by the States”); see also Hemani, 146 S. Ct. at 1694 (Thomas, J., concurring) (“The Commerce Clause does not authorize Congress to

Application of 18 U.S.C. § 922(b)(1) and (c)(1) to Young Adults

crime, when they responded at all, through the ordinary instruments of their power: prosecutions for assault and homicide, and sureties of the peace for those who threatened violence. Cf. Rahimi, 144 S. Ct. at 1899– 900. It was not until the mid-nineteenth century that the first firearmspecific sales restrictions were entertained, and even those were, by and large, framed with respect to “minors” rather than to any specific ages. See infra Part II.B.2.b.

That the government (state or federal) addressed the problem of youthful immaturity and interpersonal violence through such “materially different means” constitutes strong evidence that restricting young adults from making firearm purchases is inconsistent with the right to keep and bear arms codified in the Second Amendment. Bruen, 142 S. Ct. at 2131; see also Firearms Pol’y Coal. Inc. v. Bondi, 805 F. Supp. 3d 721, 729 (N.D. Tex. 2025) (finding restrictions on carrying weapons in a post office to be unconstitutional due to a similar lack of historical record); United States v. Ayala, 711 F. Supp. 3d 1333, 1341–42 (M.D. Fla. 2024); Post Offices at *12–13.

Because there is no “dead ringer” or “historical twin” to the age restrictions at issue, Rahimi, 144 S. Ct. at 1898 (quoting Bruen, 142 S. Ct. at 2133), we next look for a “well-established historical analogue” that is “‘relevantly similar’” to the modern restriction, Hemani, 146 S. Ct. at 1686 (quoting Bruen, 142 S. Ct. at 2132). In evaluating potential analogues, we consider “the number of jurisdictions” that adopted them, “the extent to which they were well-accepted,” and whether they are “‘relevantly similar’ to the modern law.” Wolford, 146 S. Ct. at 2044 (quoting Bruen, 142 S. Ct. at 2132). Relevant similarity, in turn, depends on the “who,” the “how,” and the “why” of the historical regulation—that is, whether it targeted the same “kinds of people,” Hemani, 146 S. Ct. at 1687; “whether it imposed a restriction similar to that imposed by the challenged law,” Wolford, 146 S. Ct. at 2044; and “whether its rationale

‘regulate or ban possession of any item that has ever been offered for sale or crossed state lines.’ Such an understanding would ‘convert congressional authority under the Commerce Clause to a general police power of the sort retained by the States.” (citations omitted)).

50 Op. O.L.C. __ (Sept. 17, 2026)

was similar to that of the new law,” id. In performing this analysis, we must be careful not to pitch our analogues “at too high a level of generality.” Id. at 2056 (Barrett, J., concurring). “[T]he appropriate analysis involves considering whether the challenged regulation is consistent with the principles that underpin our regulatory tradition.” Rahimi, 144 S. Ct. at 1898.

We have identified four candidates for potential analogues, arranged

from most to least relevantly similar: (a) general contract principles that allowed minors29 to void contracts for the purchase of goods; (b) mid-tolate-nineteenth-century statutes restricting weapons sales to those under twenty-one; (c) eighteenth- and nineteenth-century codes of conduct for university students; and (d) restrictions on who may serve as constables. None forms a “well-established and representative” tradition of restricting firearm sales to eighteen- to twenty-year-olds. Bruen, 142 S. Ct. at 2133.

The principal analogue offered in support of the federal age restrictions is the Founding-era rule that because a person under twenty-one was

considered an “infant” for purposes of contracting, 1 William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England 451 (1765), his contracts, “except for necessaries,” were “either void or voidable,” 1 Samuel Comyn, A

Treatise of the Law Relative to Contracts and Agreements Not Under

Seal *148 (1809). Although this rule was in no way specific to firearms, eighteenth-century America was a credit economy in which “very little cash changed hands,” due in part to a “shortage of a circulating medium.” Carl Bridenbaugh, The Colonial Craftsman 153–54 (1950). Minors

generally lacked wages of their own, as their parents usually “receive[d] the profits during the child’s minority,” 1 Blackstone at 441, and one modern historian has concluded that the cumulative effect of these practices was that “it became almost impossible for children to form any

contracts,” Holly Brewer, By Birth or Consent: Children, Law, and the Anglo-American Revolution in Authority 271 (2005). Because firearms

were expensive, the inability of a minor to enter an enforceable promise

29 Many of the Founding-era sources upon which we rely use the term “infants” to describe those who have not yet reached the age of majority—a term which has very different connotations today.

Application of 18 U.S.C. § 922(b)(1) and (c)(1) to Young Adults

of future payment rendered any sale of a firearm to an eighteen-year-old too risky for the average merchant. See, e.g., Counts v. Bates, 16 S.C.L. (Harp.) 464, 467 (S.C. Const. Ct. App. 1824).

Although we do not question the Founding-era economy’s dependency

on credit or the voidability rule, we conclude that this rule is not “relevantly similar” to a modern bar on the purchase of firearms. Hemani, 146 S. Ct. at 1686 (quoting Bruen, 142 S. Ct. at 2132). Like the habitualdrunkard laws rejected in Hemani, the infancy doctrine “targeted different kinds of people, did so for different purposes, and operated in different ways” than the federal age restrictions at hand here. Id. at 1687. “Whether any one of these problems taken in isolation would prove fatal to the government’s cause, we need not decide,” because “[t]aken cumulatively, . . . they certainly do.” Id.

i. Who? At the surface, the infancy doctrine and the federal age restrictions may seem to target the same “kinds of people”—those under the age of twenty-one. Id. But this ignores the fact that historical analogues matter not for their own sake but because they reveal “the principles that underpin our regulatory tradition.” Rahimi, 144 S. Ct. at 1898. On that metric, the “whos” of the two regimes are very different.

The principle underlying the voidability rule—and every other Foundingera disability that attached until a person turned twenty-one—is that minors “want judgment and discretion in their contracts and transactions with others.” 1 Comyn at *148. In particular, the infancy doctrine applied to legal dependents who remained under “the empire of the father, or

other guardian,” 1 Blackstone at 441, and whose parents were legally

bound to maintain and protect them, see id. at 435. So integrated was the minor into the household that one who “live[d] with his father or [a] guardian” who adequately cared for him could not “bind himself even for necessaries.” 2 James Kent, Commentaries on American Law 196 (1827).

As minors, those under the age of twenty-one were subject to the “power” of their parents, who “ha[d] the benefit” of and “receive[d] the profits” of their children’s labor. 1 Blackstone at 440–41. Their access to information, including books, was likewise controlled by their parents. See Brown v. Ent. Merchs. Ass’n, 564 U.S. 786, 830 (2011) (Thomas, J.,

dissenting) (observing that parents enjoyed “total parental control over children’s lives” at the Founding). And they needed parental consent

before they could enlist in the military. See Act of Mar. 16, 1802, ch. 9,

50 Op. O.L.C. __ (Sept. 17, 2026)

§ 11, 2 Stat. 132, 134–35; see also Frances M. Clarke & Rebecca Jo Plant, No Minor Matter: Underage Soldiers, Parents, and the Nationalization of Habeas Corpus in Civil War America, 35 Law & Hist. Rev. 881, 892–93

(2017).

The principle that minors cannot enter into legally binding contracts still persists today, at a high “level of generality.” Wolford, 146 S. Ct. at 2056 (Barrett, J., concurring). States continue to treat as voidable the contracts of legal minors. See Hamilton, 91 Tul. L. Rev. at 70–71.

The infancy doctrine, however, has little bearing on the current question. The disabilities of infancy were incidents to a legal status (minority) that today ends, in nearly all jurisdictions and for nearly all purposes, at “the beginning of the day before the person’s eighteenth birthday.” Restatement (Second) of Contracts § 14 (1981). At least forty-four states (plus the District of Columbia) set the presumptive age of majority at eighteen. See Hamilton, 91 Tul. L. Rev. at 65; see also Horsley v. Trame, 808 F.3d 1126, 1130–31 (7th Cir. 2015); see, e.g., Cal. Fam. Code § 6501; Va. Code § 1-204. Even the few “outlier[s],” Bruen, 142 S. Ct. at 2161 (Kavanaugh, J., concurring), recognize eighteen as the effective age of majority in most relevant areas. For example, Nebraska sets the presumptive age of majority at nineteen, Neb. Rev. Stat. § 43-2101(1), but it provides that nearly all “eighteen years of age or older . . . may enter into a binding contract or lease of whatever kind or nature,” id. § 43-2101(2) (excepting wards of the state). Although Mississippi has nominally retained twenty-one as the age of majority, Miss. Code § 1-3-27, it has conferred on all persons eighteen or older the capacity “to enter into binding contractual relationships affecting personal property,” real property, mortgages and publicly traded securities, as well as to sue and be sued on such contracts “as adults,” id. § 93-19-13(1)–(3).

That is, eighteen- to twenty-year-olds are adults, not minors, in every relevant sense—contractual capacity, emancipation from parental custody and authority, the end of entitlement to parental support, the removal of restrictions on the types and hours of their employment, legal liability, the possibility of facing adult criminal punishment, and eligibility to vote and serve in the military. Hamilton, 91 Tul. L. Rev. at 56–57 & n.1, 66–75. An eighteen-year-old today “is emancipated from the care and custody of his or her parents, and they in turn are no longer responsible for his or her care and support.” NRA I, 133 F.4th at 1173 (Brasher, J., dissenting)

Application of 18 U.S.C. § 922(b)(1) and (c)(1) to Young Adults

(citing Neville v. Neville, 34 So. 3d 779, 780 (Fla. Dist. Ct. App. 2010)). “By ending parental and state support obligations at majority, the law” not only “treats those who are aged eighteen and over . . . as capable of financial independence and responsibility for their own financial support,” Hamilton, 91 Tul. L. Rev. at 67, but it also strips the justification for any Founding-era restrictions on the purchase of firearms. Or in other words, “[i]t is one thing for a state to restrict a twenty-year-old’s freedom to defend himself when the state also imposes a legal duty of care and protection on the twenty-year-old’s parents; it is another thing entirely to prevent a twenty-year-old from acquiring the means to defend himself

when there is no one else to defend him.” NRA I, 133 F.4th at 1185

(Brasher, J., dissenting).

For similar reasons, the existence of eighteenth-century parentalfurnishing statutes does not change our view. Contra id. at 1119–20

(majority opinion). Those laws did not restrict eighteen- to twenty-yearolds from acquiring arms; they simply compelled parents to supply arms for certain purposes—namely, service in the militia. See supra Part II.A.1.c. Even if they could be read to presuppose that minors who sought to carry weapons for other purposes (such as self-defense) would also be armed through their parents rather than by their own purchases, such a reading presumes an ongoing custodial relationship. That is, parents would be under a duty to provide for the defense of their children because the law made them responsible for their dependents as a general matter. That

premise no longer holds in a society that has charged eighteen-year-olds with protecting themselves—not to mention the Nation.

Indeed, if the rule were to the contrary, one might expect the burdens of requiring young adults to rely on their parents for protection to fall most heavily on those adults least able to bear it. “Not all young adults have friends or family members who are able or willing to gift them a gun,” after all. Hirschfeld, 5 F.4th at 417. The eighteen-year-old living at home may be armed by his family, while the twenty-year-old single mother who fled an abusive home is closed out of the lawful market entirely. That is no mere hypothetical. Natalia Marshall, a nineteen-year-old plaintiff in Hirschfeld, “had good reason to seek protection”; her abusive exboyfriend, who had “been arrested for unlawful possession of a firearm and controlled substances,” had absconded after being released on bail. Id. at 411. Working as an equestrian trainer, she “often f [ound] herself in

50 Op. O.L.C. __ (Sept. 17, 2026)

remote rural areas where she interact[ed] with unfamiliar people” and was far from the aid of law enforcement. Id. But because she was nineteen, the licensed market was closed to her. Id.

One counterargument, like with our discussion of the Twenty-Sixth

Amendment, is that this view of the age restrictions’ paternalistic presumption improperly judges constitutional text based on modern understandings of the age of majority age rather than on the Amendment’s

original public meaning. We disagree. As the Supreme Court has explained, the Second Amendment is not “a law trapped in amber.” Rahimi, 144 S. Ct. at 1897. That is because “[s]pecific expectations about the consequences of a legal rule are distinct from the meaning of the rule itself.” Id. at 1925 n.* (Barrett, J., concurring) (quoting Keith E. Whittington, Originalism: A Critical Introduction, 82 Fordham L. Rev. 375, 383 (2013)). For example, the Court has explained that the right to selfdefense is not confined to the weapons that were available for self-defense in the eighteenth century. Instead, it “extends . . . to all instruments that constitute bearable arms,” Heller, 554 U.S. at 582, and protects handguns because they are “‘in common use’ today,” Bruen, 142 S. Ct. at 2134

(emphasis added) (quoting Heller, 554 U.S. at 627).

To fixate on the specific applications of Founding-era law would be to disregard the principle behind that law—that eighteen-year-olds were

subject to certain disabilities precisely because they were minors. The same analysis applies to married women, who likewise lacked capacity to contract at the Founding, under the doctrine of coverture. See 1 Blackstone at 430; Saul Cornell, “Infants” and Arms Bearing in the Era of the Second Amendment: Making Sense of the Historical Record, 40 Yale L. &

Pub. Pol’y Rev. Inter Alia 1, 9 (2021) (“In many respects, the situation of minors under twenty-one resembled that of married women under coverture.”). If general contractual incapacity in 1791 established a tradition that would permit the government to exclude the affected class from

purchasing firearms today, married women could constitutionally be

barred from gun stores. That conclusion is untenable, and the infancy analogy fails here for the same reason: The historical justification must exist in the present day for the class to which the modern law applies. The colonial treatment of those between the ages of eighteen and twenty as being insufficiently responsible to make contracts “provide[s] no justification for laws restricting” their purchase of weapons when such contracts “are unquestionably in common use today.” Bruen, 142 S. Ct. at 2143.

Application of 18 U.S.C. § 922(b)(1) and (c)(1) to Young Adults

ii. Why? Restrictions on contracts by minors also do not share the same “‘reason’ justif [ying] the restriction[s]” as section 922(b)(1) and (c)(1). Wolford, 146 S. Ct. at 2060 n.10 (Barrett, J., concurring) (quoting Rahimi, 144 S. Ct. at 1898). Infancy laws were (and are) rooted in paternalistic protection of the young from unscrupulous merchants; the age restrictions at issue here are designed to protect the public from young people with firearms. “By asking ‘why’ . . . States historically regulated the right,” we seek to “identify the range of permissible regulatory goals” that are “‘consistent with the principles that underpin our regulatory tradition.’” Id. at 2055 (quoting Rahimi, 144 S. Ct. at 1898). Importantly, in this analysis, it is not enough to answer that, at bottom, both sets of laws respond to the “judgment and discretion” that is assumed to be lacking in young adults before they reach the age of twenty-one, 1 Comyn at *148, as this pitches the comparison at the “high . . . level of generality” at which analogical reasoning goes astray, Wolford, 146 S. Ct. at 2056 (Barrett, J., concurring). Instead, in analyzing the “why” variables, the Court examines

whether there is “evidence that these laws were designed to vindicate” the same goal. Id. at 2058.

Hemani is instructive. There, the Court held it was not enough to survive Second Amendment scrutiny that eighteenth-century habitualdrunkard and vagrancy laws as well as 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(3)’s ban on

firearm possession by unlawful drug users could both, at some level, be said to target those who “regularly use intoxicants.” Hemani, 146 S. Ct. at 1687. Whatever their shared concerns about the effects of intemperance, the modern statute aims “to protect the public from unusually dangerous individuals who commit violent crimes,” whereas the habitual-drunkard laws “had little to do with protecting the public from categorically violent and unusually dangerous persons” and “did not seek to protect the public from violence so much as to protect habitual drunkards from themselves and their families from financial devastation.” Id. at 1687, 1689–90

(cleaned up). Vagrancy laws likewise aimed to “promote productivity and suppress any number of real or perceived vices”—not to “protect[] the public from a category of unusually dangerous persons.” Id. at 1690

(cleaned up).

The infancy doctrine presents a nearly identical mismatch in purpose to section 922(b)(1) and (c)(1)’s restrictions on the age of potential customers for licensed dealers. Like section 922(g)(3), Congress enacted section

50 Op. O.L.C. __ (Sept. 17, 2026)

922(b)(1) and (c)(1) to protect public safety. Specifically, Congress sought to curb “the prevalence of lawlessness and violent crime” by

keeping firearms from “emotionally immature[] or thrill-bent juveniles and minors prone to criminal behavior.” OCCSSA § 901(a)(2), (a)(6), 82 Stat. at 225–26. Rather than protecting the public from “juveniles . . . prone to criminal behavior,” id. § 901(a)(6), 82 Stat. at 226, like Foundingera habitual-drunkard laws, see Hemani, 146 S. Ct. at 1690, the infancy doctrine was designed to protect the minor himself, see, e.g., 2 Kent at 191, from “persons of more years and experience,” 1 Comyn at *148.

That is, rules allowing minors to void contracts were designed to protect the youth from predatory adults who might seek to take advantage of their lack of judgment. By contrast, the federal age restrictions are designed to protect the public from youths whose lack of judgment might prove dangerous. “The former is paternalistic; the latter targets public safety.” McCoy, 140 F.4th at 589 (Quattlebaum, J., dissenting). “Because the two sets of laws d[o] not share an analogous justification, they do not stand for the same regulatory principle” and are not relevantly similar. Wolford, 146 S. Ct. at 2060 n.10 (Barrett, J., concurring).

iii. How? Finally, having identified the “end pursued,” we examine

whether the “means deployed” are also “‘consistent with the principles that underpin our regulatory tradition.’” Wolford, 146 S. Ct. at 2055 (Barrett, J., concurring) (quoting Rahimi, 144 S. Ct. at 1898). Because the infancy doctrine did “not target any particular abuse of firearms at all,” id. at 2058, “[o]n its face, it is not clear that” a body of contract rules regarding minors is even “relevant to the issue before us,” id. at 2052 (majority opinion); see also Bruen, 142 S. Ct. at 2129–30, 2136; Rahimi, 144 S. Ct. at 1899 (discussing “American gun laws” (emphasis added)). But even if we had to look further, the regimes differ on at least four vital metrics for “how far States may go to achieve” their otherwise-lawful ends in regulating firearms. Wolford, 146 S. Ct. at 2055 (Barrett, J., concurring).

First, we start with scope. The infancy doctrine was a generally applicable rule of private law which applied equally to all contracts, whether they were for the purchase of pistols, horses, saddles, liquor, or fiddle strings.30 Today’s restrictions, by contrast, single out a subset of firearm

30 See, e.g., Counts, 16 S.C.L. (Harp.) at 464–65; Saunders Glover & Co. v. Ott’s

Adm’r, 12 S.C.L. (1 McCord) 572, 572 (S.C. Const. Ct. App. 1822).

Application of 18 U.S.C. § 922(b)(1) and (c)(1) to Young Adults

transactions for special burdens that are inapplicable to other articles of commerce. See 18 U.S.C. § 922(b)(1). This mismatch parallels the one in Wolford, where the Court held that the “gap between” Hawaii’s default carry ban (which applied essentially everywhere in that state) and its narrow anti-poaching analogues (which regulated a confined class of

places for a specific purpose) was “just too wide.” 146 S. Ct. at 2052. Here, the gap runs in the opposite direction but is no narrower: A rule of contract law that applied to all types of commercial transactions is proffered to justify a ban with criminal penalties that targets only firearm sales.

It might be answered that Rahimi relied on surety laws, which were not limited to firearms. See 144 S. Ct. at 1899–901. But Rahimi took pains to note that “the surety laws also targeted the misuse of firearms” and “specifically addressed firearms violence.” Id. at 1899–900. In 1975, for example, Massachusetts authorized “justices of the peace to ‘arrest’ all who ‘go armed offensively and require of the offender to find sureties for his keeping the peace.” Id. at 1900 (alteration accepted) (quoting 1795 Mass. Acts 66, 66–67). We have located no similar evidence that the

doctrine by which contracts with minors were voidable applied with any special weight to contracts in firearms (or weapons of any kind).

Second, we consider the mechanism of regulation. Unlike today’s restrictions, the common-law infancy rule was a civil doctrine that did not legally forbid transacting with minors. The common law distinguished

contract formation from enforceability, rendering minors’ contracts “voidable only, and not absolutely void.” 2 Kent at 191; see also 1 Zephaniah Swift, A System of the Laws of the State of Connecticut 215 (1795) (noting that, as a “general rule,” contracts involving minors for the purchase of “personal property” were “voidable”). As discussed below, minors could, and often did, form contracts and buy goods. The infancy doctrine provided only that the minor could, if he so chose, later avoid completing the contract. See NRA I, 133 F.4th at 1165–67 (Branch, J., dissenting) (noting that the “law has long recognized . . . difference between forming a contract and that same contract later being declared unenforceable”). A

Founding-era rule that gave the minor a choice to void his purchase bears little resemblance to restrictions that deny him any purchasing choice to begin with.

50 Op. O.L.C. __ (Sept. 17, 2026)

Third, and relatedly, we note that the two regimes diverge sharply in their “penalty—another relevant aspect of the burden.” Rahimi, 144 S. Ct. at 1902. As just explained, the infancy doctrine prohibited nothing, criminalized nothing, and imposed no penalties upon either the minor or his contractual counterparty beyond that which each voluntarily assumed.

That is a far cry from the modern law at issue, which makes it a federal felony punishable by up to five years’ imprisonment for any licensed

firearms dealer who sells a handgun or ammunition to a legal adult who has not yet reached the age of twenty-one. See 18 U.S.C. § 922(b)(1), (c)(1); id. § 924(a)(1)(D). A Founding-era merchant who sold a firearm to a twenty-year-old faced, at most, a risk that the minor might later rescind the transaction and recover the purchase price. Today, that same merchant would face serious prison time. But “[r]efunds are a standard part of commercial life” and cannot “be seriously compared with the threat of prison.” McCoy, 140 F.4th at 588–89 (Quattlebaum, J., dissenting). 31

Fourth, looking to the practical effect of the legal regime restricting the ability of minors to enter binding contracts, it is entirely unclear from the historical record that minors “not be[ing] held liable for failing to uphold their side of a contract over goods” created a “considerable risk” for extending credit to them that deterred merchants from selling them firearms. Brewer at 265; see id. at 270–71. Lawyers, economists, and policymakers can make assumptions about how a rationally minded merchant

would respond to market forces. But, as one jurist has noted, sources supporting that view provide “merely indirect evidence that, ex ante, minors may have had practical difficulties purchasing non-necessary

goods.” NRA I, 133 F.4th at 1166 (Branch, J., dissenting). There is at least some case law showing that firearm sales to minors still occurred despite the presumed exclusion of young adults from the market. See Saunders

Glover & Co. v. Ott’s Adm’r, 12 S.C.L. (1 McCord) 572, 572 (S.C. Const. Ct. App. 1822) (holding that a merchant could not collect payment on a

31 The Court in Rahimi reasoned that if “imprisonment” was historically a “permissible” penalty for “the use of guns to threaten the physical safety of others,” then it only makes sense that “the lesser restriction of temporary disarmament” for those subject to a domestic-violence restraining order “is also permissible.” 144 S. Ct. at 1902. That greaterincludes-the-lesser logic runs in the opposite direction here, where the lesser burden (a civil rule of voidable contracts) is offered to justify the greater burden (a flat criminal prohibition backed by imprisonment).

Application of 18 U.S.C. § 922(b)(1) and (c)(1) to Young Adults

voided account where the minor had purchased a pistol on credit); see also Soper v. President & Fellows of Harvard Coll., 18 Mass. (1 Pick.) 177, 183–84 (1822) (per curiam) (recognizing that despite the voidability rule, people “will nevertheless give credit” to minors and that an outright statutory ban was “perhaps the only remedy” available); cf. Bruen, 142 S. Ct. at 2131 (noting that if earlier generations failed to address a problem known at the time and related to a guaranteed right, it constitutes evidence against the constitutionality of a modern regulation).

The analogy only worsens on further inspection. Even on its own terms, the infancy doctrine never restrained cash purchases. Yet federal law criminalizes cash purchases of firearms by adults under the age of twentyone. 18 U.S.C. § 922(b)(1), (c)(1). A civil doctrine that, so far as the historical record shows, posed little barrier to purchasing anything at all cannot justify a criminal ban on handgun purchases by young adults. Any effect the infancy doctrine had on firearm ownership was, at most, incidental. The modern law is thus not relevantly similar to the infancy laws. See Wolford, 146 S. Ct. at 2044. The two regimes “target[] different kinds of people” (legal minors under the custody and protection of parents or guardians, as opposed to emancipated adults), “d[o] so for different purposes” (the protection of the minor’s purse, as opposed to the public’s safety), and “operate[] in different ways” (rendering credit contracts voidable while leaving cash purchases untouched, as opposed to imposing a flat prohibition that is punishable by imprisonment). Hemani, 146 S. Ct. at 1687. Setting aside whether any one of these defects alone would be fatal, together they certainly are. See id.

After the infancy doctrine in contract law, the next most likely candidate for a historical analogue to section 922(b)(1) and (c)(1) is a series of state laws that, beginning in 1856, restricted the sale of firearms—

typically pistols—to legal minors. At the outset, these examples highlight the absence of any similar Founding-era ban on firearm sales to eighteento twenty-year-olds. Although the analogue fits today’s restrictions more closely than does the doctrine that minors may not enter contracts, these mid-to-late-nineteenth-century statutes are nonetheless inadequate to satisfy the government’s burden of proving that the modern law is in line

50 Op. O.L.C. __ (Sept. 17, 2026)

with a historical regulatory tradition, for at least three reasons that, “[t]aken cumulatively,” are “fatal.” Id.

First, like the infancy doctrine, see supra Part II.B.2.a.i, these statutes “targeted different kinds of people” and for different reasons—namely, minors rather than young adults. Hemani, 146 S. Ct. at 1687. Thirteen of these states—Alabama, Delaware, Georgia, Kansas, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Wisconsin —framed their prohibitions in terms of providing weapons to a

“minor” rather than to someone of a particular age.32 Such laws had the same effect on everyone who was legally a child, whether they were twenty months old or twenty years old. If the exact same language were on the books today, these laws would apply only to those under eighteen, because that is now the age of adulthood. Three other states—Indiana, Louisiana, and Wyoming—referred to persons under twenty-one in the main text of their regulations, but the titles or contemporary annotations of those laws specified that their purpose was to restrict the sale of firearms to minors.33 Two

32 See NRA v. Bondi, 61 F.4th 1317, 1333 (11th Cir. 2023) (collecting state laws), vacated on reh’g en banc, 133 F.4th 1108 (11th Cir. 2025); see also, e.g., An Act to Amend the Criminal Law § 1 (1856), in Acts of the Fifth Biennial Session of the General Assembly of Alabama at 17 (1856) (making it unlawful to “sell or give or lend, to any male minor, a bowie knife, or knife . . . or pistol”); An Act to Punish Any Person or Persons Who Shall Sell, Give, Lend, or Furnish Any Minor or Minors With Deadly Weapons Herein Mentioned, and for Other Purposes § 1 (1876), in Acts and Resolutions of the General Assembly of the State of Georgia at 112 (1876) (“to sell, give, lend or furnish any minor or minors any pistol”).

33 See An Act to Prohibit the Sale, Gift, or Bartering of Deadly Weapons or Ammunition Therefor, to Minors, in Laws of the State of Indiana, Passed at the Forty-Ninth Regular Session of the General Assembly at 59 (1875); An Act Making It a Misdemeanor for Any Person to Sell, Give or Lease, to Any Minor, Any Pistol, Bowie-Knife, Dirk or Any Weapons, Intended to Be Carried or Used as a Concealed Weapon (1890), in Acts Passed by the General Assembly of the State of Louisiana at the Regular Session at 39 (1890); An Act Defining Crimes, Regulating Criminal Procedure, and for Other Purposes § 97 (1890), in Session Laws of Wyoming Territory Passed by the Eleventh Legislative Assembly at 127, 140 (1890) (annotation reading “[s]elling weapons to minors”). As we have explained previously, “the title of a statute and the heading of a section are tools available for the resolution of a doubt about the meaning of a statute.” Constitutionality of Race-Based Department of Education Programs, 49 Op. O.L.C. __, at *32 (Dec. 2, 2025) (quoting Dubin v. United States, 143 S. Ct. 1557, 1567 (2023)); see also Scalia & Garner

Application of 18 U.S.C. § 922(b)(1) and (c)(1) to Young Adults

more jurisdictions—Maryland and the District of Columbia—referred to

“minor[s] under the age of twenty-one years.”34

Laws that distinguish based on the minority of the regulated parties

impose restrictions on those who remain under the legal custody and

protection of their parents. See NRA I, 133 F.4th at 1118 (“minors were subject to the power of their parents and depended on their parents’

consent to exercise rights and deal with others in society”); see also id. at 1185 (Brasher, J., dissenting). As already discussed, they stand for the unremarkable proposition that legislatures may impose disabilities on dependents that they may not impose on adults. See supra Part II.B.2.a.i.

Second, these Reconstruction-era laws came generations too late to

control our understanding of the Second Amendment’s scope. Because the Second Amendment “codified a pre-existing right,” Heller, 554 U.S. at 592 (emphasis in original), Bruen’s historical inquiry focuses on “the scope” that the right was “understood to have when the people adopted” it in 1791, 142 S. Ct. at 2136 (quoting Heller, 554 U.S. at 634–35). This tracks the Court’s practice of interpreting the other constitutional amendments by reference to their Founding-era understanding. See, e.g., Nev. Comm’n on Ethics v. Carrigan, 564 U.S. 117, 122–25 (2011) (First

Amendment); Virginia v. Moore, 553 U.S. 164, 168–69 (2008) (Fourth

Amendment); Gamble v. United States, 587 U.S. 678, 702–04 (2019)

(Fifth Amendment); Crawford v. Washington, 541 U.S. 36, 42–50 (2004)

(Sixth Amendment); SEC v. Jarkesy, 144 S. Ct. 2117, 2128 (2024) (Seventh Amendment). The “history that matters most is the history surrounding the ratification of the text.” Rahimi, 144 S. Ct. at 1924 (Barrett, J., concurring).

Measured against these principles, the Reconstruction-era laws arrived far too late to control our understanding of the Second Amendment’s

original meaning. Because section 922 is a federal statute, we doubt that 1868 could supply the relevant baseline: The Fourteenth Amendment, by its own terms, binds only the “State[s].” U.S. Const. amend. XIV, § 1; cf. Bruen, 142 S. Ct. at 2137.

at 221. They can be particularly useful in understanding the purpose behind the statute. FTC v. Mandel Bros., Inc., 359 U.S. 385, 388–89 (1959).

34 See 1882 Md. Laws 656, 656; see also 27 Stat. 116, 117 (1892) (District of Columbia).

50 Op. O.L.C. __ (Sept. 17, 2026)

But even if that were incorrect, age restrictions in only three states— Alabama (1856), Tennessee (1856), and Kentucky (1860)—predate the

Fourteenth Amendment (barely). 35 Like the Supreme Court, “we doubt

that three . . . regulations could suffice to show a tradition.” Bruen, 142 S. Ct. at 2142 (emphasis in original). And we are particularly hesitant to infer such a tradition from “southern laws restricting gun rights that were enacted before the Civil War given Congress’s grave concern about

southern states disarming freed Blacks during this period.” Hirschfeld, 5 F.4th at 440. Indeed, at least one of those antebellum laws expressly coupled minors with the enslaved: The 1860 statute enacted by Kentucky prohibited the sale, loan, or gift of “any pistol . . . to any minor, or slave, or free negro.” An Act to Amend an Act § 23 (1860), in 1 Acts of the

General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Kentucky at 241, 245 (1860).36

The remainder of these statutes were adopted in the late 1870s and

1880s37—more than eighty years after ratification of the Second Amendment, by which point the Founding generation had long since passed

away. Such “mid- to late-19th-century” evidence may “confirm[]” a

Founding-era understanding, and a “regular course of practice,” if “open, widespread, and unchallenged since the early days of the Republic,” can “liquidate” the meaning of a genuinely “indeterminate” or “ambiguous” text. Bruen, 142 S. Ct. at 2136–37 (citations omitted). But even then, nineteenth-century history is of “secondary” value and must be discounted to the extent it “contradicts” the Second Amendment’s “text” or “earlier evidence.” Id. at 2137, 2154.

Any tradition that can be drawn from statutes that so “long postdate[] ratification” does little to “illuminate[] the meaning” of the Second

35 See 1855 Ala. Laws 17; Tenn. Code § 4864 (1858); 1859 Ky. Acts 245.

36 Cf. Heller, 554 U.S. at 614 (observing that “[b]lacks were routinely disarmed by

Southern States after the Civil War” and singling out Kentucky as a notable offender); Wolford, 146 S. Ct. at 2053 (refusing to find “probative for present purposes” an 1865 Louisiana statute that “provided a tool for disarming blacks and thus leaving them defenseless against attacks”); id. at 2060 (Barrett, J., concurring)

37 See 1875 Ind. Acts 59; 1876 Ga. Laws 112; 1878 Miss. Laws 175; Mo. Rev. Stat.

§ 1274 (1879); 1881 Ill. Laws 73; 16 Del. Laws 716 (1881); 1882 Md. Laws 656; 1882 W. Va. Acts 421; 1883 Kan. Sess. Laws 159; 1883 Wis. Sess. Laws 290; 1884 Iowa Acts 86; 1885 Nev. Stat. 51; 1890 La. Acts 39; 1893 N.C. Sess. Laws 468; 1897 Tex. Gen. Laws 221; 1890 Wyo. Sess. Laws 140; 27 Stat. 116 (1892) (District of Columbia).

Application of 18 U.S.C. § 922(b)(1) and (c)(1) to Young Adults

Amendment. Rahimi, 144 S. Ct. at 1924 (Barrett, J., concurring). Nor can this later history “liquidate” a new, narrower understanding of the Second Amendment. Id. (quoting Vidal v. Elster, 144 S. Ct. 1507, 1531 (2024) (Barrett, J., concurring)). Liquidation presupposes a “vague constitutional text” and an “elusive” or “inconclusive” pre-ratification history. Id. at 1912, 1916 (Kavanaugh, J., concurring). Neither condition holds here. As we have already explained, the Second Amendment’s text plainly

encompasses eighteen- to twenty-year-olds, see supra Part II.A.1; and the Founding-era record not only contained no age-based arms restrictions, as far as we can tell, but instead affirmatively obligated this cohort to arm itself, see supra Parts II.A.1.c., II.B.1. Statutes that first appeared sixtyfive years after constitutional ratification and that inverted a Founding-era understanding are precisely the sort of “contradict[ory],” latter-day evidence the Supreme Court refuses to credit. Bruen, 142 S. Ct. at 2137.

We have identified two primary counterarguments. To start, some have

argued—and at least one court has accepted—that the absence of Foundingera sales bans reflects not constitutional constraint but the absence of the problem that animates today’s laws. See McCoy, 140 F.4th at 579. On this account, handgun ownership was rare before the mid-nineteenth century, but once handguns became widespread, legislatures promptly restricted their purchase by minors. Id. We agree that courts should not “assume[] that founding-era legislatures maximally exercised their power to regulate.” Rahimi, 144 S. Ct. at 1925 (Barrett, J., concurring). And the Court acknowledged in Bruen that “cases implicating unprecedented societal

concerns or dramatic technological changes may require a more nuanced approach.” 142 S. Ct. at 2132.

But the Supreme Court has effectively foreclosed this argument. Specifically, it has held that “the Second Amendment ‘can, and must, apply to circumstances beyond those the Founders specifically anticipated,’”

Hemani, 146 S. Ct. at 1687 (quoting Bruen, 142 S. Ct. at 2132), and that the constitutional status of handguns hinges on their “‘common use’

today”—not their common use in “the 1690s” or the 1850s. Bruen, 142

S. Ct. at 2134, 2143; see Heller, 554 U.S. at 629. And for good reason: The underlying factual premise of this theory is overstated. Pistols, though less common than other firearms, existed at the Founding and

were a familiar article of early American commerce. See Clayton E.

Cramer & Joseph Edward Olson, Pistols, Crime, and Public: Safety in

50 Op. O.L.C. __ (Sept. 17, 2026)

Early America, 44 Willamette L. Rev. 699, 706–11 (2008) (outlining the prevalence of pistols at the time of the Founding). They appear in the period’s case reports and probate inventories. See, e.g., Sounders Glover, 12 S.C.L. (1 McCord) at 572; see generally James Lindgren & Justin L. Heather, Counting Guns in Early America, 43 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 1777

(2002). And the historical record shows that those under twenty-one could and did purchase them—the eighteen-year-old Davy Crockett apparently

had little trouble buying a pistol. The Life of David Crockett at 50–51; see also supra Part II.A.1.c. The Founding generation was also no stranger to the immaturity of young men—or to interpersonal violence, for that

matter. See supra Part II.B.1. Yet, despite that familiarity with both pistols and the impulsivity of late-teenage males, the Founding generation enacted no arms restriction on this class and instead mandated its possession of arms.

Second, these laws are too scattered to give rise to a “well-established and representative” tradition. Bruen, 142 S. Ct. at 2133. As the Court has long held in the context of other individual rights, it is only a “universal and long-established tradition of prohibiting certain conduct” that “creates a strong presumption that the prohibition is constitutional.” Republican Party of Minn. v. White, 536 U.S. 765, 785 (2002) (citation and quotation marks omitted). “An outlier legal rule adopted in a few locales is not enough.” Wolford, 146 S. Ct. at 2050. As discussed above, most Reconstruction-era laws restricted the provision of weapons to minors. At the turn of the twentieth century, only West Virginia and Nevada had expressly barred the sale of firearms purely on the basis of age, without reference to minority status. See 1882 W. Va. Acts 421; 1885 Nev. Stat. 51. Even if these laws were of an appropriate vintage (and they are not), two states out of forty-five38 constitute “outlier[s]” rather than evidence of a “widespread, well-known, and widely accepted” tradition. Wolford, 146 S. Ct. at 2050, 2053; Bruen, 142 S. Ct. at 2142.

True, the number of jurisdictions that restricted the sale of firearms to those under twenty-one continued to grow. But so too did their distance from the ratification of the Second Amendment—with a concomitant

38 By the turn of the twentieth century, only nineteen of the forty-five states “limited

the Second Amendment rights of eighteen-to-twenty-year-olds in some way” at all Reese, 127 F.4th at 599; see id. at 599 n.17 (collecting statutes); see NRA I, 133 F.4th at 118s (Brasher, J., dissenting) (same).

Application of 18 U.S.C. § 922(b)(1) and (c)(1) to Young Adults

reduction in their interpretive value. Moreover, by 1923, that count had crept up to only twenty-one (out of forty-eight) states, which means that more than 130 years after the Second Amendment’s ratification, fewer

than half of the existent states were restricting eighteen- to twenty-yearolds from accessing firearms. See Hirschfeld, 5 F.4th at 438–39. This is too little, too late to “establish an early American tradition” for the purposes of ascertaining constitutional meaning. Espinoza v. Mont. Dep’t of Revenue, 140 S. Ct. 2246, 2258–59 (2020) (noting that a practice which “arose in the second half of the 19th century,” though reflected in more than thirty state laws, did not “by itself establish an early American tradition”).39

Apart from these laws, those searching for an analogue to modern laws disarming young adults have cited rules adopted by several early American colleges forbidding students from keeping or using firearms either onor off-campus. See Robert J. Spitzer, Historical Weapons Restrictions on Minors, 76 Rutgers U. L. Rev. Comments. 101, 112–19 (2024); Megan

Walsh & Saul Cornell, Age Restrictions and the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, 1791–1868, 108 Minn. L. Rev. 3049, 3069–75 (2024). These include the University of Georgia in 1810, the University of Virginia in 1824, and the University of North Carolina in 1838. 40

39 This tally overstates the level of agreement even at that late date, because it includes

laws that are different in kind, see 1885 Nev. Stat. 51 (addressing the concealed carry of pistols, not their purchase), and laws from jurisdictions whose enactments we have been instructed to discount, see Bruen, 142 S. Ct. at 2154 (noting the Wyoming territory’s “transitional and temporary character”); id. at 2155 (explaining that Kansas “operated under a fundamental misunderstanding of the right to bear arms”).

40 See Univ. of Ga. Librs., The Minutes of the Senatus Academicus 1799–1842, at 86

(Aug. 9, 1810), https://perma.cc/EW28-VU83 (prohibiting students from possessing firearms off campus); Encyclopedia Va., University of Virginia Board of Visitors Minutes at 6–7 (Oct. 5, 1824), https://perma.cc/F32R-AWK9 (“UVA Minutes”) (prohibiting students from keeping “weapons or arms of any kind, or gunpowder” on school grounds); Acts of the General Assembly and Ordinances of the Trustees, for the Organization and Government of the University of North Carolina 15 (1838) (prohibiting students from “keep[ing] . . . fire arms[] or gunpowder,” from “carry[ing], keep[ing], or own[ing] at the College . . . any deadly weapon,” and from “us[ing] fire arms without permission from the President”). Yale also barred students from “keep[ing] any kind of fire-arms[] or gun45

50 Op. O.L.C. __ (Sept. 17, 2026)

Assuming that the Second Amendment applied against state universities before the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, the college codes fail on both the “why” and the “how” aspects of the Bruen test as clarified by Wolford. As to the “why,” they were not restrictions on the rights of citizens based on age, but rather restrictions on students based on “the special characteristics of the school environment.” Mahanoy Area, 141 S. Ct. at 2044 (quoting Hazelwood Sch. Dist. v. Kuhlmeier, 484 U.S. 260, 266 (1988). Their rationale, in other words, was to exercise “the comprehensive authority” that “school officials” have always had “to

prescribe and control conduct in the schools,” Tinker v. Des Moines

Indep. Cmty. Sch. Dist., 393 U.S. 503, 507 (1969), rather than the broad public-safety purpose behind the federal age restrictions. As a result, these college restrictions “applied to all enrolled students regardless of age,” Reese, 127 F.4th at 596 (emphasis in original), including both students older than twenty—adults even under the contemporary common-law

rule—and students under eighteen, who were minors under either era’s

standards.41

As to the “how,” the codes were not firearm-specific regulations. A

college could impose “[a]ny rule or regulation for the betterment of ” its students’ “physical, moral, and mental welfare,” including rules “deny[ing] students the autonomy and rights enjoyed by others in order to preserve institutional harmony.” Brian Jackson, The Lingering Legacy of In Loco Parentis: An Historical Survey and Proposal for Reform, 44

powder.” The Laws of Yale-College 26 (1800). Because Yale was private, it was subject to different constitutional rules. See id. at 12–13; cf. Trs. of Dartmouth Coll. v. Woodward, 17 U.S. (4 Wheat.) 518, 561–71 (1819).

41 One study of New England colleges between 1751 to 1860 found that “the most

common age of students at graduation was consistently from ages twenty to twenty-two,” with graduates ranging from those “older than twenty-eight” to those “younger than eighteen.” Spitzer, 76 Rutgers U. L. Rev. Comments. at 114 n.74 (citing David F. Allmendinger, The Dangers of Ante-Bellum Student Life, 7 J. Soc. Hist. 75, 131–38 (1973)); see also Iran Cassim Mohsenin, Note on Age Structure of College Students, 23 Hist. Educ. Q. 491, 491 (1983) (explaining that, because admission was based on particular competencies, the ages of students ranged from early adolescence to above thirty); e.g., 5 Franklin Bowditch Dexter, Biographical Sketches of the Graduates of Yale College 632 (1911) (noting that John C. Calhoun graduated from Yale College in 1804 at the age of twenty-two); UVA Minutes at 3 (“No student is to be recieved [sic] under 16 years of age.”).

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Vand. L. Rev. 1135, 1146–47 (1991). The firearm provisions sat alongside a “vast array of rules and restrictions” governing every corner of student life. Id. at 1140. Taken on their own terms, moreover, the codes were too narrow to support a blanket ban on purchasing (and, by extension, on keeping and bearing) weapons: Most reached only school

grounds, making them, if anything, forerunners of “sensitive places”

regulations. See Bruen, 142 S. Ct. at 2133 (identifying schools as among the “few 18th- and 19th-century ‘sensitive places’ where weapons were altogether prohibited”). And their violation could be sanctioned by fines, suspension, or expulsion—not imprisonment.

By any metric, rules governing what students may keep or carry at college are a poor analogue for a nationwide bar on handgun purchases by every adult under twenty-one. If anything, these college codes point the other way: A college’s decision to forbid its students from keeping or using firearms presupposed that, away from campus, students of that age could possess those arms. Whatever rules may have governed college

campuses, they cannot justify the restrictions at issue here.

Finally, we are aware of at least one rule excluding “infants” from service as constables. See Reese, 127 F.4th at 597 & nn.13–14 (citing John Faucheraud Grimke, The South-Carolina Justice of Peace 117–18 (3d ed. 1810)); McCoy, 140 F.4th at 591 (Quattlebaum, J., dissenting) (same). The “whys” of this rule are admittedly obscured by time. Leaving aside that one rule does not a robust history and tradition make, this one does not seem to reflect a concern that the young lacked the judgment to carry firearms: The same also excluded the elderly, clergymen, attorneys,

physicians, and the sick. See Reese, 127 F.4th at 597; McCoy, 140 F.4th at 591 (Quattlebaum, J., dissenting). This rule also did not share the same “how,” because it did not act to disarm those excluded from constable service. See Reese, 127 F.4th at 597. It merely exempted the covered

groups from an office whose duties included summoning and leading the armed posse. See supra Part II.A.1.c. Given that eighteen- to twenty-yearolds were still expected to arm themselves when called by the constable as part of the posse comitatus, all this rule really did was exclude minors from law-enforcement leadership.

50 Op. O.L.C. __ (Sept. 17, 2026)

III.

In sum, because the modern federal age restrictions limit young adults between the ages of eighteen and twenty from obtaining arms, they “fall[] within the plain text of the Second Amendment” and are “presumptively unconstitutional.” Wolford, 146 S. Ct. at 2044. As we have not identified “any analogue or collection of analogues” that “is ‘relevantly similar’ to the modern law,” our view is that the government is unable to overcome this presumption. Id. (quoting Bruen, 142 S. Ct. at 2132).

In reaching this conclusion, we are aware that we are not writing on a blank slate. The question of whether the Second Amendment permits

government (state or federal) to bar young adults from obtaining firearms has deeply divided members of the federal bench. 42 Having carefully

considered these courts’ decisions, we do not think that their reasons for reaching a contrary conclusion under Bruen can be reconciled with the Court’s intervening clarifications in Hemani and Wolford.43 Thus, we do not think those lower-court decisions should control this Office in the advice it gives you as you assist the President in the performance of his independent constitutional duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” U.S. Const. art. II, § 3; see also Application of the Rehabilitation Act and Americans with Disabilities Act to State Institutionalization of Patients with Severe Mental Illness or Disabilities, 50 Op. O.L.C. __, at *12 (June 18, 2026); Section 1715 at *14; cf. Eric S. Fish, Prosecutorial Constitutionalism, 90 S. Cal. L. Rev. 237, 254 (2017) (noting that “a number of important constitutional rights go underenforced by judges” and

42 Compare Reese, 127 F.4th 583 (invalidating the federal age restrictions at issue

here), Worth, 108 F.4th 677 (invalidating Minnesota’s age-based public-carry restriction), and Lara, 125 F.4th 428 (invalidating Pennsylvania’s age-based carry regime), with McCoy, 140 F.4th 568 (sustaining the federal age restrictions); NRA I, 133 F.4th 1108 (sustaining Florida’s ban on firearm purchases by persons under twenty -one), and Rocky Mountain Gun Owners, 121 F.4th 96 (sustaining Colorado’s age-based purchase restrictions).

43 For example, Rocky Mountain Gun Owners concluded that young adults were not

part of “the people” by examining a historical regulatory tradition during Bruen’s first step. 121 F.4th at 119–20. Wolford unequivocally places such analysis in step two. 146 S. Ct. at 2049. And the historical analyses of McCoy and NRA I proceeded at a level of generality—and with cumulative mismatches of person, purpose, and operation—that stand in stark contrast to the analysis employed in Hemani. See Hemani, 146 S. Ct. at 1687.

Application of 18 U.S.C. § 922(b)(1) and (c)(1) to Young Adults

that Executive Branch officials should “supplement judges’ enforcement efforts by incorporating constitutional rights into their own decisionmaking processes”).

We conclude by noting, however, a few limits on this opinion. For example, we do not address the age-neutral conditions and qualifications on commercial sales, the prohibition on the possession of handguns by those under eighteen, 18 U.S.C. § 922(x), or even the enhanced investigative period Congress has prescribed for purchasers under twenty-one, id.

§ 922(t)(1)(C); see also generally McRorey v. Garland, 99 F.4th 831 (5th Cir. 2024). And nothing in this opinion should be read to cast doubt on the distinct prohibitions of section 922(g), certain of which the Supreme Court has recently discussed with approval. See Hemani, 146 S. Ct. at 1692 n.6. We also do not address the constitutionality of section 922(b)(1)’s prohibition as it applies to sales to persons under eighteen, who—though part of “the people” for the purposes of the Constitution—may constitutionally be subject to certain legal disabilities until they reach the age of majority, under the historical regulatory tradition discussed above. See supra

Part II.B.2; cf. Paxton, 145 S. Ct. at 2300.

Instead, we conclude only that section 922(b)(1) and (c)(1) may not be enforced to impose criminal penalties on dealers who sell handguns, the “quintessential self-defense weapon,” Heller, 554 U.S. at 629, to a class of law-abiding adults who in nearly every other domain are full members of the political community.

T. ELLIOT GAISER

Assistant Attorney General

Office of Legal Counsel

Application of 18 U.S.C. § 922(b)(1) and (c)(1) to Young Adults

Authorities cited

Opinion · public domain