Appeals Court Rejects PA’s Bid to Send Challenge to Under 21 Gun Carry Ban Down to Lower Court

Last updated on November 18th, 2024 at 04:49 pm

A federal appeals court has rejected the Pennsylvania state government’s request to send a lawsuit challenging Pennsylvania’s under 21 firearm carry ban back to a lower court level.

Gun rights activists in the state of Pennsylvania have been actively challenging the state’s law barring adults between the ages of 18 and 20 from public firearm carry.

The legal challenge, brought with the support of the Firearms Policy Coalition (FPC) and the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF), has already gone through the district and circuit court levels.

U.S. District Judge William S. Stickman IV, of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania, ultimately granted a motion by the defendants to dismiss the case in an April 2021 ruling. Stickman, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, concluded the challenged Pennsylvania law was among a number of “longstanding” and “presumptively lawful” gun control measures permitted in the wake of the 2008 Supreme Court decision of District of Columbia v. Heller.

The plaintiffs subsequently appealed the decision to the Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. In January, a three-judge panel on the appeals court ruled 2-1 in favor of the plaintiffs, vacated the lower court’s decision, and imposed an injunction blocking enforcement of the age-limit law. Circuit Judge Kent A. Jordan, an appointee of former President George W. Bush, authored the majority opinion, which was joined by D. Brooks Smith, another Bush appointee.

The state of Pennsylvania asked the U.S. Supreme Court to weigh in after the Third Circuit Court denied a request for a re-hearing of the case before a full en-banc panel of the appeals court.

The Supreme Court, on Oct. 15, issued what’s known as a grant, vacate, remand (GVR) ruling, granting cert to consider the case, while vacating the Third Court’s January decision and remanding the case back to the appellate level for reconsideration. The move effectively reinstated Pennsylvania’s under 21 carry ban while the legal challenges play out.

The Supreme Court had asked the Third Circuit to reconsider the challenge in light of the high court’s June ruling in United States v. Rahimi. The Rahimi case concerned challenges to U.S. federal laws that prohibit people from possessing firearms while they are under an active restraining order, even if they haven’t been convicted of a crime. In Rahimi, the Supreme Court ruled that such gun control laws are constitutional, so long as authorities can demonstrate an analogous law existed at the time of America’s founding.

Hoping to stifle the legal challenge even further, the state of Pennsylvania asked the Third Circuit Court to remand the case again, down to the district court level. The appeals court panel denied that motion in a one-page Nov. 18 order.

The Monday ruling doesn’t halt the Pennsylvania law, but could speed up efforts by the plaintiffs to put the issue back before the Supreme Court.

“We will continue to aggressively litigate this matter before the Third Circuit which already found that 18-20-year-olds are part of ‘the People’ and that this nation’s history required these adults to be armed along with a corresponding absence of any restrictions,” SAF Executive Director Adam Kraut said following the Supreme Court’s GVR ruling last month.