Second Amendment advocates suffered a setback on Tuesday after the Supreme Court vacated a Third Circuit ruling that found Pennsylvania's law forbidding adults under 21 from openly carrying during a state of emergency violated their Second Amendment rights. 

The state of Pennsylvania sought a Supreme Court review of the decision, arguing that the Third Circuit erred by not looking at several 19th-century statutes that restricted the ability of under-21s to acquire a firearm. Pennsylvania Attorney General Michelle Henry also argued that under the Supreme Court's decision in Rahimi, the state did not have to find a historical "twin" to the statute in question. Instead, the "appropriate analysis is whether the challenged regulation is consistent with the principles that underpin our regulatory tradition." 

Relying on the Supreme Court’s landmark Second Amendment decision from 2022, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, a divided three-judge appeals court panel found that the law was unconstitutional because there was not a similar law on the books at the time the Second Amendment was ratified.

The 2022 decision generally requires governments to point to a similar historical law in order to overcome constitutional challenges. But the 6-3 ruling, which split the court’s conservative and liberal justices, has created significant confusion in lower courts about how exact that historical antecedent must be.

Pennsylvania officials argued that the lower federal court overread the Bruen decision. Several conservative justices wrote separate opinions to note that the court’s decision said nothing about who may possess a firearm or the requirements that must be met to buy one.

Without explanation or any dissent, the Supreme Court justices granted the state's cert request, but then vacated the Third Circuit's decision and remanded the case back to the appellate court for further review in light of Rahimi rather than address the state's arguments themselves. 

The decision to send Paris v. Lara back to the Third Circuit doesn't mean that the appellate court is automatically going to reverse its earlier ruling, but it's still not great news for Second Amendment advocates. The best outcome would have been for the Court to simply reject Pennsylvania's request, which would have kept the Third Circuit ruling in place. By sending the case back to the appellate court for a do-over, the Court is, at the very least, indicating a majority of the justices have an issue with how the Third Circuit reached its conclusion, if not the decision itself. 

The biggest problem that Pennsylvania faces in defending the law in question is that the vast majority of the laws they cited in defense of the carry ban for young adults were 19th-century restrictions on minors acquiring firearms. In the 1800s, the age of majority was often set by the states at 21, but these days 18, 19, and 20-year-olds are seen as adults in the eyes of the law. A prohibition on under-21s bearing arms in the mid-1800s is more analogous to a modern statute prohibiting under-18s from lawfully carrying today, not the Pennsylvania statute in question that bars young adults from exercising their right to carry. 

Henry maintains that prohibiting all young adults from lawfully bearing arms is "consistent with the Founding-era practice of disarming those who present a danger to the public". Even if under-21s are more likely to commit crimes than those over the age of 65, prohibiting an entire class of adults from exercising a fundamental component of their Second Amendment rights simply because of their age should be far too broad to pass constitutional muster. It's troubling that a majority of the justices on the Court felt the need to punt Paris back to the lower courts for another round of briefing and arguments, but Pennsylvania's AG still has her work cut out for her in defending the state's carry ban for young adults.