The Department of Justice told a federal appeals court this week that the longstanding federal ban on selling handguns to adults aged 18 to 20 violates the Second Amendment, marking a dramatic reversal of the government's own legal position and potentially upending a restriction that has stood since 1968.
The filing, submitted to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, represents a sharp break from the Biden administration's defense of the same law. DOJ now argues that the historical record does not support barring legal adults from purchasing handguns from licensed dealers, a position that aligns the executive branch with gun-rights challengers for the first time on this question.
Federal law has prohibited licensed firearms dealers from selling handguns to anyone under 21 since the Gun Control Act of 1968. Adults aged 18 to 20 can legally possess handguns and can acquire them through private sales in many states, but they cannot walk into a federally licensed dealer and buy one. The restriction has faced sporadic legal challenges over the years, but courts largely upheld it before the Supreme Court reshaped Second Amendment law in 2022.
The case before the Fourth Circuit, Fraser v. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, was brought by young adults and gun-rights groups who argue the ban strips 18-to-20-year-olds of their core constitutional right to keep and bear arms. A lower court had upheld the restriction, and the challengers appealed. The Biden DOJ defended the law at every stage.
Then the administration changed, and so did the government's position. As CBS News reported, the Trump DOJ filed a brief reversing course and telling the Fourth Circuit that the ban cannot survive constitutional scrutiny under the framework the Supreme Court established in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen.
The Supreme Court's 2022 decision in Bruen rewrote the rules for evaluating gun laws. Before Bruen, most federal courts used a two-step test that weighed the government's interest in public safety against the burden on gun rights. Bruen replaced that approach with a historical test: a firearms regulation is constitutional only if the government can show it is "consistent with this Nation's historical tradition of firearm regulation."
That standard has forced courts to dig into colonial-era statutes, Founding-era militia laws, and Reconstruction-era regulations to decide whether modern gun restrictions have adequate historical analogs. The results have been uneven, with different circuits reaching different conclusions on everything from ghost guns to assault weapons bans. A federal court recently struck down Delaware's ban on homemade firearms under this same framework, illustrating how broadly Bruen has reshaped the legal landscape for firearms litigation.
DOJ's new brief in Fraser argues that the historical record does not contain a tradition of disarming 18-to-20-year-olds. The government contends that at the Founding, the right to bear arms extended to those 18 and older, and that militia laws of the era routinely required service from men as young as 18, which necessarily presumed their right to possess and acquire firearms, including handguns.
The reversal puts DOJ in the unusual posture of arguing against a federal statute it previously defended. The department's brief does not simply concede the case; it affirmatively argues that the ban is unconstitutional. That distinction matters because it signals a considered legal judgment, not just a litigation strategy of declining to defend.
Gun-control groups reacted sharply. Everytown for Gun Safety and other organizations that had intervened in the case to defend the law called the reversal reckless and warned it could lead to more gun violence among young adults. They argue that 18-to-20-year-olds are disproportionately involved in gun violence and that Congress had sound reasons for imposing the age restriction.
The Brady Campaign similarly criticized the move, framing it as part of a broader effort by the Trump administration to dismantle federal firearms regulations. Supporters of the ban point to public health data showing elevated rates of gun homicide and suicide among young adults as justification for treating handgun purchases differently from rifle purchases, which are permitted at 18 under federal law.
The plaintiffs in Fraser and their allies welcomed the DOJ filing as long overdue. The Firearms Policy Coalition, which has backed similar challenges nationwide, called the age-based ban one of the most clearly unconstitutional federal gun restrictions on the books. Their argument is straightforward: if 18-year-olds are legal adults who can vote, serve in the military, enter contracts, and be tried as adults in criminal court, the government cannot strip them of a fundamental constitutional right based solely on age.
Challengers have also pressed courts to recognize that the Bruen framework leaves little room for age-based restrictions. They note that the Supreme Court's decision did not carve out exceptions for young adults, and that the historical record the government must rely on does not support such a carve-out. Similar arguments have surfaced in Second Amendment cases working their way toward the Supreme Court, where challengers contend that lower courts have been too willing to invent historical justifications for modern gun laws.
The Fourth Circuit now faces a case where the principal defendant, the federal government, agrees with the plaintiffs that the challenged law is unconstitutional. That does not automatically end the case. Intervenors, including gun-control organizations that joined the litigation to defend the statute, remain in the case and will continue pressing the court to uphold the ban.
The court could rule the ban unconstitutional, affirm the lower court's decision upholding it despite DOJ's changed position, or craft a narrower ruling. If the Fourth Circuit strikes down the ban, the decision would apply in Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. Other circuits could reach different results, creating the kind of circuit split that often draws Supreme Court review.
The Supreme Court has already shown willingness to take up Second Amendment disputes in the post-Bruen era. The Court struck down a Hawaii gun law last term, rejecting the state's attempt to invoke local cultural traditions as grounds for limiting the right to bear arms. A circuit split on the handgun-age ban would present the justices with a clean vehicle to resolve whether the Second Amendment protects the right of 18-to-20-year-olds to purchase handguns from licensed dealers.
The Fraser filing fits within a broader pattern of the Trump DOJ reassessing federal firearms enforcement. The department recently declined to appeal a landmark ruling that struck down decades of federal suppressor restrictions, signaling a willingness to let pro-gun judicial decisions stand rather than fight them.
That approach represents a fundamental shift in how the executive branch treats gun cases. Under the Biden administration, DOJ aggressively defended virtually every federal firearms restriction challenged in court, even where the historical arguments were thin. The current DOJ appears to be making case-by-case judgments about which laws can survive Bruen and declining to defend those it believes cannot.
Critics say this amounts to the executive branch selectively enforcing the law. Defenders say DOJ has a constitutional obligation not to defend statutes it believes violate the Bill of Rights. Both sides acknowledge the practical stakes: if the federal government stops defending a gun law, the burden falls entirely on intervenors, who may lack the litigation resources and institutional credibility that DOJ brings to a case.
The Fourth Circuit will likely schedule oral argument in the coming months. The intervenors will carry the defense of the statute, and the court will have to grapple with the historical evidence on both sides. Whatever the panel decides, the losing side will almost certainly seek en banc review or petition the Supreme Court.
If the ban ultimately falls, the practical effect would be significant. Licensed dealers across the country would be able to sell handguns to 18-to-20-year-olds, subjecting those buyers to the same background-check requirements that apply to all dealer sales. That would close what gun-rights advocates have long called an irrational gap: young adults can buy rifles and shotguns from dealers at 18, and can legally possess handguns, but cannot purchase handguns through the regulated dealer system that includes federal background checks.
Gun-control advocates counter that expanding handgun access to younger buyers will lead to more deaths and that Congress, not the courts, should decide firearms policy. They point to the political difficulty of passing new gun legislation as evidence that judicial invalidation of existing laws leaves a vacuum that lawmakers cannot easily fill.
The Supreme Court's recent willingness to enforce constitutional text against popular regulation suggests the justices may eventually weigh in. If they do, the case could produce the most consequential Second Amendment ruling since Bruen itself.
When the government itself tells a court that its own law violates the Constitution, the judiciary should listen. The Second Amendment does not come with an age asterisk, and adults old enough to serve their country should not need permission from Congress to exercise the rights that country was built on.
