For years, the NRA has been litigating a Florida law that bans young adults aged 18-20 from purchasing a firearm. In 2021, a federal judge begrudgingly upheld the law, despite finding that it imposed sever restrictions on the people’s right to keep and bear arms while affording very few public safety benefits. The judge, however, felt like he was bound by Eleventh Circuit precedent that forbid him from striking the law.
That decision was appealed to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals in 2021. After sitting on the case for over a year—and after the Supreme Court ruled in NYSRPA v. Bruen—a three-judge panel of the court upheld the law. That panel ruled that the Second Amendment should be interpreted as it was understood in 1868, when the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified thereby incorporating the Second Amendment to the states, as opposed to 1791, when the Second Amendment was originally ratified. But the Supreme Court could not have been clearer in Heller and Bruen that 1791 is the more appropriate timeframe for interpreting the Second Amendment: “As we recognized in Heller itself, because post-Civil War discussions of the right to keep and bear arms ‘took place 75 years after the ratification of the Second Amendment, they do not provide as much insight into its original meaning as earlier sources.’”
It also appears that the NRA is not the only one who recognized the error in the panel’s decision. Within six hours of the decision coming down, the court issued a separate order indicating that a judge on the Eleventh Circuit has requested that the full en banc court hear the case. And now the NRA is also asking that the full court reconsider the panels decision.
The case is captioned National Rifle Association v. Bondi.
Please stay tuned to www.nraila.org for future updates on NRA-ILA’s ongoing efforts to defend your constitutional rights.