A Clinton-appointed federal judge in Hawaii ruled Friday that the state can continue barring adults aged 18 to 20 from owning firearms, rejecting a Second Amendment challenge and finding that historical tradition supports the restriction. The decision bucks a growing wave of federal court rulings that have struck down similar age-based gun laws across the country.
U.S. District Judge Susan Oki Mollway, appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1998, issued a 44-page opinion in Firearms Policy Coalition v. City and County of Honolulu, holding that Hawaii's prohibition on firearm ownership by young adults between 18 and 20 does not violate the Second Amendment. The ruling hands a win to Hawaii and to gun-control advocates at a moment when courts elsewhere have been moving sharply in the opposite direction.
Hawaii law prohibits anyone under 21 from acquiring or owning a firearm. The Firearms Policy Coalition (FPC), a national gun-rights organization, challenged the ban on behalf of young adults who are otherwise legal adults under both federal and state law. FPC argued that 18-year-olds possess full Second Amendment rights and that Hawaii's blanket prohibition cannot survive constitutional scrutiny.
The case was litigated under the framework set by the Supreme Court's landmark 2022 decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. That ruling, authored by Justice Clarence Thomas, requires courts evaluating gun regulations to determine whether the restriction is "consistent with this Nation's historical tradition of firearm regulation." The test demands that the government identify historical analogues from the founding era or the Reconstruction period that justify the modern law.
Judge Mollway concluded that Hawaii met its burden. She pointed to a collection of colonial-era and 19th-century militia laws that imposed age-based restrictions on who could bear arms. She also cited English common law traditions restricting minors' access to weapons, treating 21 as the traditional age of majority for purposes of arms-bearing rights. The court found these historical sources sufficient to establish a pattern of age-based firearm restrictions that Hawaii's modern law fits within.
FPC pressed hard on the text of the Second Amendment. The organization argued that "the people" whose right to keep and bear arms is protected by the amendment includes all adults aged 18 and older. FPC noted that 18-year-olds can vote, serve in the military, enter contracts, and face criminal prosecution as adults. Excluding them from firearm ownership, FPC contended, treats them as second-class citizens for constitutional purposes.
Judge Mollway acknowledged that 18-year-olds are part of "the people" under the Second Amendment but held that this does not end the inquiry. Under Bruen, even if a person falls within the amendment's scope, the government may still regulate their conduct if it can show a historical tradition of doing so. The court found that tradition present here, relying on laws from colonies including Virginia and Massachusetts that restricted militia service and weapons possession to those 21 and older.
The FPC challenged the relevance of militia laws, arguing they regulated military service obligations rather than individual rights to private firearm ownership. Judge Mollway rejected that distinction, finding that militia regulations reflected broader societal judgments about the appropriate age for bearing arms and that Bruen does not require a precise historical twin, only a well-established analogue.
The ruling drew sharp criticism from FPC. The organization called the decision "an outlier" and vowed to appeal, as the Daily Caller reported.
Judge Mollway's decision arrives against a backdrop of federal courts increasingly siding with Second Amendment challengers on age-based gun restrictions. In recent years, multiple circuit and district courts have struck down laws barring 18-to-20-year-olds from purchasing or carrying firearms.
A Florida appeals court struck down that state's concealed carry ban for 18-to-20-year-olds, finding it unconstitutional under the same Bruen framework that Judge Mollway applied to reach the opposite result. The Fourth Circuit, the Fifth Circuit, and other federal courts have issued similar rulings, creating a growing circuit split on the question.
That split matters. When federal appeals courts disagree on a constitutional question, the issue becomes a strong candidate for Supreme Court review. FPC and allied organizations have signaled they intend to push the age-restriction question to the justices, and Hawaii's law could become part of that pipeline if the Ninth Circuit upholds Mollway's ruling on appeal.
The Supreme Court's own trajectory on gun rights has been unmistakable. The Bruen decision in 2022 reshaped Second Amendment law nationwide, and the Court has continued to expand gun-rights protections in subsequent terms. The justices struck down a Hawaii gun law in a separate case, rejecting the state's argument that local cultural values could justify limiting the Second Amendment.
The central battleground in post-Bruen litigation is history. Both sides in the Hawaii case presented competing readings of the founding-era record, and the disagreement illustrates a tension that runs through gun-rights cases across the country.
Hawaii's attorneys assembled a collection of colonial statutes, English common law sources, and 19th-century state laws to argue that age-based restrictions have deep roots. They emphasized that 21 was the age of majority at common law and that multiple colonies restricted weapons possession or militia participation to those who had reached that age.
FPC countered with its own historical evidence. The organization pointed to founding-era state constitutions that broadly protected the right to bear arms without age qualifications. FPC also cited evidence that teenagers and young adults routinely owned and carried firearms in colonial and early American society, arguing that scattered militia regulations did not reflect a general tradition of disarming young adults.
Justice Thomas's constitutional theory on federal gun laws has become the lens through which every lower court must now evaluate these disputes. But as the Hawaii case shows, the historical-tradition test can produce wildly different results depending on which sources a judge credits and how broadly or narrowly the judge reads the historical record.
Critics of the Bruen framework have argued that it gives trial judges too much discretion to cherry-pick historical evidence. Supporters counter that the test anchors gun-rights analysis in constitutional text and history rather than in the policy preferences of individual judges. The Hawaii ruling will test both arguments on appeal.
Hawaii has long maintained some of the most restrictive gun laws in the nation. The state requires permits to purchase any firearm, mandates registration of all guns, and imposes waiting periods. Its ban on ownership by those under 21 is among the strictest age-based restrictions in the country, going beyond the federal prohibition on licensed dealer sales of handguns to those under 21 by barring all firearm ownership entirely.
The state's geographic isolation and small population have historically insulated its gun laws from the political pressures that drive firearms policy on the mainland. But the post-Bruen legal landscape has brought Hawaii's regulatory regime under sustained constitutional attack. FPC and other groups have filed multiple challenges to Hawaii firearms laws in recent years.
The federal government's own posture on gun regulation has shifted dramatically. The Trump administration's Department of Justice has taken an aggressive stance against state-level gun restrictions, filing a federal lawsuit against California over its Glock ban and signaling willingness to challenge blue-state firearms laws in court.
FPC has indicated it will appeal Judge Mollway's ruling to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The Ninth Circuit, which covers Hawaii along with California, Oregon, Washington, and other western states, has a mixed record on Second Amendment cases in the post-Bruen era. Some panels have struck down gun restrictions; others have upheld them. The circuit's ideological composition, shaped by decades of Democratic appointments, makes it a difficult venue for gun-rights challengers.
If the Ninth Circuit upholds the Hawaii ruling, the resulting conflict with other circuits that have struck down similar age restrictions would strengthen the case for Supreme Court review. Gun-rights organizations have been building toward a high-court showdown on the 18-to-20-year-old question, and the Hawaii case could provide the vehicle.
In the meantime, the practical effect of Judge Mollway's ruling is that young adults in Hawaii between 18 and 20 remain unable to legally own a firearm. They can vote. They can enlist. They can sign binding contracts and face life sentences in criminal court. But under this ruling, they cannot exercise what the Supreme Court has called a fundamental, individual constitutional right.
The broader legal landscape continues to move in gun owners' favor. Federal courts have gutted longstanding NFA restrictions on suppressors, struck down carry bans, and invalidated state-level purchase prohibitions. Hawaii's ruling stands as a holdout in that current, not a reversal of it.
The circuit split on age-based gun restrictions is widening, not narrowing. Every new ruling on either side of the question increases the pressure on the Supreme Court to step in and settle the matter. The justices who decided Bruen built a framework that demands historical answers to modern constitutional questions. Now the lower courts are delivering conflicting answers, and young adults in different states hold different constitutional rights depending on their zip code.
When the government can strip a constitutional right from millions of legal adults based on their age, the burden of justification should be heavy. Whether a handful of colonial militia statutes carries that weight is a question that one district judge in Honolulu should not get to answer for the entire country.
