FILE – President Donald Trump gestures as if aiming a sniper rifle while speaking to reporters in the James Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House on Monday, April 6, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson, File)
The Trump administration on Friday issued a legal opinion concluding that two federal laws restricting licensed firearms dealers from selling handguns to adults younger than 21 are unconstitutional.
The 49-page opinion was written by T. Elliot Gaiser of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, or OLC, and addressed to U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche.
“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,’” the OLC opinion states.
The provisions under review appear in two subsections of 18 U.S.C. §922. They prohibit federally licensed gun dealers from selling “any firearm or ammunition” to people they know, or reasonably believe, are under 21, except for rifles, shotguns and related ammunition. A related law also mandates sworn statements confirming age in certain handgun purchases that are not completed over the counter.
With the opinion, the Justice Department is effectively notifying prosecutors and courts that it views the federal handgun age restrictions as unenforceable.
“Our laws deem an eighteen-year-old ‘mature enough to be drafted, vote, serve as a juror, and be sentenced to death,’” Gaiser wrote. “One such eighteen-year-old represented the United States at the Tokyo Olympics in 2020, shooting skeet. 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.”
The OLC’s conclusion follows recent shifts in Second Amendment case law.
In late June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Wolford v. Lopez. Writing for the court, Justice Samuel Alito found that Hawaii’s law barring licensed concealed-carry permit holders from bringing handguns onto private property open to the public without the owner’s express permission was unconstitutional.
According to the OLC, the federal age limits “single out a subset of firearm transactions for special burdens that are inapplicable to other articles of commerce.” The office argued that the restrictions present the same kind of “mismatch” identified in Wolford, creating a constitutional gap that is “just too wide.”
“Here, the gap runs in the opposite direction but is no narrower,” the opinion goes on, rubbishing arguments for applying the legal concept of “infancy” to gun sales for 18- to 20-year-olds. “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.”
The OLC opinion also comes the day after the Trump administration signaled it would not appeal a district court ruling that found unconstitutional certain regulations on silencers, short-barreled rifles, and short-barreled shotguns.
That lower court opinion, penned by U.S. District Judge James Wesley Hendrix, a Trump appointee, was not referenced by the OLC.
The advisory opinion also references a 2024 ruling from the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that found unconstitutional a Minnesota state law that limited gun-carrying permits to applicants who are at least 21 years old.
“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, while denying them the core Second Amendment right to bear arms in self-defense,” the OLC opinion continues. “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.”
The OLC opinion, while straightforward in its conclusions, is not legally binding on any court or prosecutor and does not carry the weight of precedent.
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