Dr. John Lott has a new op-ed at Townhall.
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Gun control advocates have condemned the Justice Department’s decision to stop criminally enforcing the nearly 60-year-old 1968 federal ban on licensed dealers selling handguns to law-abiding 18-, 19-, and 20-year-olds. They say it will cause the loss of life. “That’s because young Americans are disproportionately likely to commit gun violence,” claims the GIFFORDS Center’s Executive Director Emma Brown.
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It is true that young people commit crime at relatively high rates, but they are also more likely to be victims of crime. A 20-year-old woman facing a stalker needs protection as much as a 21-year-old woman does. Young adults also face substantial risks of becoming victims: Reported rapes are 32% more likely for ages 18 to 20 than for people ages 21 to 23, and the younger group’s homicide rate is 7% higher.
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The 1968 law isn’t the only time that the government has raised the age requirement for handguns. The 1968 law barred licensed dealers from selling handguns to 18- to 20-year-olds, but it did not ban them from possessing handguns. In 1994, Congress enacted the first federal law that, with limited exceptions, barred people under 18 from possessing handguns. Eighteen states had previously passed such bans, 15 of them between 1975 and 1993.
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Professor Thomas Marvell has the only peer-reviewed study by a criminologist or economist on this type of age restriction on possession. It was published in the Journal of Law and Economics, and concluded: “Where the 1994 laws seem to have an impact, the suggestion is almost always that crime increases; thus, there is no evidence that these bans had their intended effect.”
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The one public health study looked at the states that raised the age to purchase a handgun from any source for those under 21 and while it doesn’t account for many of the factors that Marvell does, it found no statistically significant benefit.
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Nor are these findings unusual. Gun bans consistently produce more crimes because they disarm law-abiding good people relative to gang members. Indeed, every place in the world governments have banned either all guns or all handguns, murder and homicide rates have risen, often by several fold or more. These increases have occurred not only in U.S. jurisdictions such as Washington, DC, and Chicago, where handgun bans were implemented, but also in island nations such as the Republic of Ireland and Jamaica.
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Random variation alone would suggest that at least once a ban would coincide with falling or stable murder rates. Yet, murder and homicide rates have increased every single time.
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Emma Brown portrays the Trump administration’s decision as a refusal to enforce the law. But the administration is only following the majority of court decisions and the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel opinion that have raised the same constitutional objection. The Fifth Circuit ruled against the federal restriction on handgun sales by licensed dealers. The Third Circuit ruled against Pennsylvania’s effective ban on carrying during declared emergencies. The Eighth Circuit struck down Minnesota’s minimum age for carry permits, and a Florida state appeals court struck down that state’s concealed-carry age requirement. These rulings address different laws, but each recognizes a Second Amendment claim for adults under 21. The only cases that has upheld threating 18 to 20 years old adults as different than those who are 21 is from the Fourth and Eleventh Circuits.
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Today’s 18- to 20-year-olds are adults whose need for self-defense does not begin at 21. Under Bruen, the government must identify a historical tradition of similar restrictions. The courts found no age restrictions around 1791 when the Second Amendment was adopted; even if we use 1868, when the states ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, as the historical benchmark, only three states had restricted pistol transfers to legal minors. Today, 18 to 20-year-olds are considered adults.
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Indeed, the most common laws actually mandated ownership. The majority of courts pointed to the 1792 militia law, which required men to enroll and arm themselves at 18, as evidence against excluding that age group from the right.
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This requirement to own a gun was also widespread among the states. Georgia’s 1784, Maine’s 1820, Massachusetts’ 1775, New Hampshire’s 1786, New York’s 1786, New Jersey’s 1781, Rhode Island’s 1779, Virginia’s 1777, and Vermont’s 1779 laws all required males from 16 years and older to provide a firearm at their own expense and there were fines for those who didn’t have a gun. North Carolina’s 1777 law also applied to those 16 and older but guns were provided for to men who couldn’t afford them. South Carolina and Pennsylvania’s laws applied to those who were 18 and up. And these laws lasted for a long time. For example, from 1792 until 1893, Connecticut males 18 and up were required to provide a firearm following the federal militia law. After 1893, the state was to provide the weapons.
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Today, 18-year-olds generally reach the legal age of majority. That was not true when these laws were being adopted: a 1872 State Department survey reported that males reached majority at 21 in every state it listed. Many states only lowered the age of majority to 18 during the 1970s.
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Unlike today, men under 21 weren’t even considered to be an adult with all the rights that come with it. A U.S. State Department survey in 1872 reported that males reached majority at 21 in every state it listed. It wasn’t until the 1970s when states started reducing the age to 18.
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Guns can enable violence, but they also help people defend themselves—especially women and people who face high rates of violent crime, including poor Black residents of high-crime neighborhoods.
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Drug gangs involved in much of the crime committed by young people will still obtain weapons. A ban will chiefly constrain people who obey the law.
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If gun control groups had the chance, they would likely raise the minimum age to buy a gun well beyond 21.
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It is true that 18 to 20 year olds commit murder at a higher rate than those 21 to 24, but there is a reason that every time all guns or all handguns have been banned murder rates go up. Gun bans disproportionately disarm law-abiding compared to gang members and other criminals. Ultimately, gun control advocates probably don’t think there is any age at which people should own guns.
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