Just think of NYSRPA v. Bruen as the judicial gift that keeps on giving, striking down plainly unconstitutional and arbitrary limits on the right to keep and bear arms from coast to coast. The latest victory comes from Pennsylvania where the Third Circuit Court of Appeals has struck down the Keystone State’s ban on adults under 21 years old carrying firearms outside the home.
From the Firearms Policy Coalition . . .
Today, Firearms Policy Coalition (FPC) announced that the Third Circuit Court of Appeals has struck down Pennsylvania’s laws that prevent 18-to-20-year-old adults from carrying a loaded firearm outside of the home for self-defense. The opinion in Lara v. Evanchick can be viewed at FPCLegal.org.
“It is undisputed that 18-to-20-year-olds are among ‘the people’ for other constitutional rights such as the right to vote, freedom of speech, peaceable assembly, government petitions, and the right against unreasonable government searches and seizures,” wrote Judge Kent A. Jordan, author of the majority opinion. “As we recently observed in Range, there is ‘no reason to adopt an inconsistent reading of “the people.”’ Indeed, wholesale exclusion of 18-to-20-year-olds from the scope of the Second Amendment would impermissibly render ‘the constitutional right to bear arms in public for self-defense … ‘a second-class right, subject to an entirely different body of rules than the other Bill of Rights guarantees.’”
“We applaud the Third Circuit’s decision in this case confirming that 18-to-20-year-old adults have the same right to armed self-defense as any other adult,” said Cody J. Wisniewski, FPC Action Foundation’s Vice President and General Counsel, and counsel for FPC. “If it wasn’t for 18-to-20-year-old adults being empowered to exercise their right to defend themselves, their loved ones, and their communities, our Nation wouldn’t exist–it would be a deep perversion of the Constitution to prevent them the same right today.”
FPC is joined in this lawsuit by the Second Amendment Foundation.