A three-member panel of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled unanimously on Jan. 30 in the case of Reese v. ATF that the federal law barring the sale of handguns to those between the ages of 18 and 20 was unconstitutional.

Applying the Supreme Court’s spongy history-based standard for judging the constitutionality of modern gun laws based on the existence of similar old gun laws, a standard it set in its 2022 Bruen decision, the appeals court dismissed the government’s effort to defend the law as based on “scant evidence that eighteen-to-twenty-year-olds’ firearm rights during the founding-era were restricted in a similar manner to the contemporary federal handgun purchase ban.”

Most importantly, the conservative court relied on the fact that 18- to 20-year-old men were required by a 1792 federal law to serve in the militia (along with those up to the age of 45), saying that this age group “must be covered by the plain text of the Second Amendment, as they were compulsorily enrolled in the regiments that the Amendment was written to protect.”

But the court made three fundamental mistakes in its analysis.

First, it gave scant attention to the fact that those under 21 were universally understood at the time to be minors or “infants” (the legal term applied at the time to non-adults), who by definition were not entitled to adult rights. Only once did the court even mention the term “infant” in passing. Yet abundant founding-era and later legal sources confirm this understanding, such as 1790s legal treatises from

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