Pennsylvania laws imposing restrictions on gun possession for young people are unconstitutional, a federal appeals court said in a new, split ruling.
A panel of judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit reconsidered whether Pennsylvania’s ban on 18- to 20-year-olds openly carrying guns during emergencies was constitutional after the U.S. Supreme Court in 2024 remanded the case back to the circuit court.
A majority of the panel said their previous decision, which concluded that the law violates the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment, was correct even in light of recent Supreme Court rulings that struck down a New York gun law and upheld a federal gun law. The rulings are known as Bruen and Rahimi.
“We conclude that our prior analysis reflects the approach taken in Bruen and clarified in Rahimi,” U.S. Circuit Judge Kent A. Jordan wrote for the majority. “We did indeed consider ‘whether the challenged regulation is consistent with the principles that underpin our regulatory tradition,’ not whether a ‘historical twin’ of the regulation exists. Having determined that Rahimi sustains our prior analysis, we will again reverse and remand the District Court’s judgment.”
Pennsylvania adults and gun groups sued over the laws in 2020, arguing they violated the constitutional rights of those aged 18 to 20. U.S. District Judge William Stickman IV ruled in 2021 that the restrictions covered conduct that was outside the scope of the Second Amendment, citing a 2008 Supreme Court ruling.
After that ruling, justices sent the challenge to Pennsylvania’s open carry ban back to the Third Circuit with instructions to reconsider its prior decision.
Jordan said in the new opinion that the Second Amendment covers all adults, not just those 21 and older, and that Pennsylvania officials in making their case improperly relied on restrictions that came decades after America’s founding.
The only founding-era law that officials cited prohibited carrying guns or hunting on lands other than one’s property.
“To the extent the statute did burden the right to carry a gun in public, it did so without singling out 18-to-20-year-olds, or, for that matter, any other subset of the Pennsylvania population. Although the Commissioner is not tasked with identifying a precise match between the present-day regulation and historical precursors, he fails to establish that the Pennsylvania statutory scheme disarming Appellants is at all analogous to the founding-era statute he leans on,” Jordan said.
“In making this observation, we are not, as he complains, demanding that he produce a historical twin; we are insisting only that he provide something that in principle is genuinely analogous, and the 1721 Pennsylvania statute falls conspicuously short.”
Jordan was joined by U.S. Circuit Judge D. Brooks Smith.
U.S. Circuit Judge Judge L. Felipe Restrepo said in a dissent that he sided with Pennsylvania officials.
Restrepo noted that the Supreme Court has held that the Constitution protects a person’s right to carry a gun outside their home but said an examination of the Constitution and other sources showed the Second Amendment did not cover 18- to 20-year-olds.
“A review of historical sources reveals that the Second Amendment’s plain text does not cover Appellants’ conduct because it would have been understood during the Founding era that Appellants are not ‘part of ‘the people’ whom the Second Amendment protects,” he wrote. “Further, the challenged statutory scheme here is ’consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition,‘ and ’consistent with the principles that underpin our regulatory tradition.'”
The office of Pennsylvania Attorney General Michelle Henry declined to comment.
The Firearms Policy Coalition, one of the groups that sued over the laws, hailed the new ruling.
