Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz is running for vice president in part on his anti-gun credentials. While he claims to support the Second Amendment, he supports an awful lot of anti-Second Amendment laws.
One of them prohibits adults under the age of 21 from getting a concealed carry permit. Since it’s unlawful to bear arms in pretty much any way in Minnesota without one, this created a bit of an issue. That means a legal challenge and the lost; first at the district court and then in the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals.
But they weren’t done fighting. They wanted to get an en banc panel of the Eighth Circuit to hear their appeal.
And, they lost.
From a Second Amendment Foundation press release:
The Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has denied a petition for a rehearing in a Second Amendment Foundation case which found Minnesota’s ban on carry permits for young adults ages 18-20 is unconstitutional.
The case is known as Worth v. Harrington, and it was filed in June 2021. Joining SAF in this case are the Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus, Firearms Policy Coalition and three private citizens, Austin Dye, Axel Anderson and Kristin Worth, for whom the case is known. They are represented by attorneys Blair W. Nelson of Bemidji, Minn., and David H. Thompson, Peter A. Patterson and William V. Bergstrom at Cooper & Kirk in Washington, D.C.
In its order, the Eighth Circuit also denied a request for an en banc panel hearing. U.S. District Court Judge Katherine Menendez, a 2021 Joe Biden appointee, ruled in March 2023 that Minnesota’s permitting age restriction is unconstitutional. The case was appealed to the Eighth Circuit, which upheld Judge Menendez decision.
“Clearly, Judge Menendez made the right call in the first place,” said SAF Executive Director Adam Kraut. “As we contended all along, the right of the people mentioned in the Second Amendment was not limited to those over a certain age. Certainly young adults fall within the definition of ‘the people’ ever since they’ve been allowed to vote, and generations before that when they were considered part of the militia, and have been accepted into the military.”
“We expected to prevail at trial and again at the appeals court level,” said SAF founder and Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb. “We are gratified by the Eight Circuit’s decision, and now we will see whether Minnesota submits a petition for certiorari to the Supreme Court. For the time being, we have notched another victory in our ongoing effort to win firearms freedom one lawsuit at a time.”
The fact that this was a Joe Biden appointee just really makes everything better, but the Eighth Circuit denying Minnesota the opportunity for this to be reheard is just icing on the cake.
See, the issue, at least as I see it, is the whole idea of the Second Amendment being a second-class right. People such as Walz and many other Minnesota lawmakers figure that it might be a right, but they can deny law-abiding adults that right as much as they wish, whereas they would never really try it with so many other rights enshrined in our first ten amendments.
They’re called the Bill of Rights, not the Bill of Rights for People Over 21. They apply to everyone.
Yet because lawmakers don’t like guns, they see no problem in deciding people under the age of 21 shouldn’t enjoy the totality of their constitutionally protected rights. We don’t deny freedom of speech to only those old enough to drink. We don’t say that you’re not protected from unreasonable search and seizure after you break that threshold. We don’t do any of that because these. Are. Adults.
These are people who we might think of as kids in a lot of contexts, but people their age died on the sands of Iwo Jima and Omaha Beach, on the fields of Gettysburg, at Khe Sanh, in the streets of Fallujah and so many other places that memory and history have forgotten. They’re old enough to take on debt, to vote, and so many other things, yet it’s fine to deny them the right to bear arms lawfully?
I’m sorry, but no.
The Second Amendment Foundation notched an important win.
My guess is that Minnesota will decline to take this any further because we all know how the Supreme Court is likely to rule and they won’t want to create a legal precedence that unravels similar laws elsewhere.
That just means we’ll have to dismantle such laws one by one.
