All law-abiding citizens of this country are considered adults at the age of 18 for nearly all purposes. They can vote, enter into contracts, start businesses, get married and join the military. But the state prohibits them from exercising the fundamental right to bear arms, that is, to carry a handgun outside the home or in an automobile, even though the state allows other adults to obtain a license to carry firearms in public.
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We’re asking the court to remedy this situation by issuing an injunction against further enforcement of the ban on our individual plaintiffs and other young adults facing the same situation. Citizens in this age group enjoy nearly all of the rights guaranteed by the Constitution except when it comes to the Second Amendment. This cannot be allowed to stand.
Alan M. Gottlieb
May 27, 2021
SAF FILES FEDERAL CHALLENGE TO ILL. CARRY BAN FOR YOUNG ADULTS
[Incrementalism at work.
It’s a good venue as well. Judges in the Seventh Circuit have been good to us.—Joe]
There are three logical possibilities:
1) Persons accounted as “adult” at age 18 should be given the whole range of legal adult rights, responsibilities and privileges; ergo, the current law and implementation must change
2) Persons aged 21 are adults, and persons aged 18 are “junior” or “probationary” adults, which are afforded some of the rights, responsibilities and privileges of adults; ergo, the law and implementation are correct, and the junior adults need an attitude adjustment, possibly a formal legal term to make the concept clear
3) Our method of adjucating persons as “adult” merely by their age, and not their personal capacity and assumption of responsibility, is fundamentally flawed, and we need a new way to recognize US persons as “adult”, possibly even “junior adult”, and otherwise continue to make the legal distinctions with “juveniles” who have not achieved adult status.
Personally, I would favor the third option. I think we’ve all met people of majority age that shouldn’t be trusted out of the house without a guardian. Quite a lot of such people are on university campuses, reveling in those institutions’ dual purpose as open-air insane asylums.
There would need to be objective criteria dividing the categories, as well as objective legal differences.
I think it would make adulthood much more significant is, rather than “you’ve lived long enough”, you’d file at the courthouse with an application and records that show that you’ve lived for the previous year with your personal expenses less than or equal to your personal income, without unearned outside assistance (including student loans that you are not paying down the principle at a rate to clear the debt within 15 years), thus proving that you can manage your own affairs and won’t become a public charge. It’d be a shall-issue situation when the objective performance criteria are met. Then you’d get to enter into contracts without a co-signer, vote in federal and state elections, run for public office, carry a firearm, buy booze and other recreational substances, etc. But you can’t be dependent on anyone else. I think this is a status people should be able to lose for similar objective criteria demonstrating that you can’t uphold your obligations as an adult.
At the other end would be juveniles, or “dependents” above the age of 15. Must have an adult or junior adult guardian, can’t enter into contracts, can’t vote, can’t buy booze or weed. If they get public assistance, it goes through a guardian first, where it counts against their income.
In the middle is the junior adults, who can vote in local elections, enter into contracts with permission of their adult guardian, gets loans with a co-signer, carry a firearm with approval of their guardian, join the military (and if they don’t blow all their pay on beer, they’d be on the fast track into adulthood). Not sure what the dividing line criteria between juvenile and junior adult should be… maybe they can live independently on no worse than a 50/50 split of their own income and external assistance. In other words, get a job.
I haven’t thought out all parts of the arrangement, but at least in my mind, it’d be an improvement over treating people as adults just because they managed not to die for 18 years. The average life expectancy isn’t 45 any more (like was when the founders thought you had to be 21 to vote), and the quality of the schooling means you can’t expect an 18 year old to know anything.
It needn’t be complicated. Any person old enough to be in military service is an “adult” for the purposes of this discussion.
Remember, the NRA was formed by veteran Civil War commanders for the express purpose of improving the marksmanship of the average American, SO AS to better protect the country in times of armed conflict. Restricting even pre military-aged persons’ full access to and use of arms negates this purpose, seriously compromising our military’s efficiency and readiness. THIS is why the left hates the NRA— The job of the left is to bring down Western Civilization and obliterate it.
This of course is to say nothing of the issue of the right to keep and bear arms. And so we must be aware, and keep it foremost in our minds in such times, that a right is a right, and is to be upheld, defended and protected, no matter the various arguments or even outcomes, on the basis that it is right, and that which is NOT right is wrong and nothing good can come from laws or policies based on wrong!
In terms of case law it would be interesting to know how, why, when, under what circumstances and by what arguments the constitutional rights of minors have been asserted and upheld. For example, has it been considered constitutional, historically, for police to stop and search minors without a warrant, to refrain from reading them their rights upon arrest, to deny them counsel, or to force them to self incriminate, etc?
Certainly, a minor’s so-called “right” to an abortion is upheld, defended and protected, even to the point of public officials being required to keep a minor’s parents uninformed and thus completely out of the decision-making process. By that standard we’d be giving firearms to minors, and government authorities would be cooperating so as to keep said minors’ parents unaware of it. By that standard, there’d be taxpayer-funded “give a kid a gun” programs, and 501C3 tax exempt “charities” also handing out guns to kids, and every city and every little town in the country would have public-supported shooting ranges and marksmanship training programs. Thus we’re seeing one absurd, evil extreme being used to instill a morbid fear of the notion of the other!
But such blatant display of hypocrisy is no problem whatsoever for the Romish left. They’ll always find a way to justify hypocrisy, asserting their own feelings, or “tradition”, or simply the power to get away with it, as proof of their righteousness! It’s all about power, and the exercise of arbitrary power and ever-changing standards is seen by them as a sign of their legitimacy. They lust for legitimacy and thus, ever-unable to have the real thing, any mock legitimacy, when applied and exercised, is in their minds, to their glory. The point being, don’t believe you can simply shame a Roman, who already thinks he’s a god (and unfortunately, through capitulation, we’ve inadvertently helped him along in his belief) and therefore clearly has no sense of shame, into changing his mind based on reason, principles or evidence!
Remember that Cain murdered Able, not because Able was a bad man, but because Able, through the mere example of his goodness, simultaneously received God’s approval and exposed Cain’s error. THAT is the mindset which we face— The better we are, the more perceptive, correct, solemn, dignified, reasonable and consistent we are, and thus the more solid the foundations of our arguments, the more the allies of Rome will hate us! It can’t be helped.
Too bad then, isn’t it, that the United States government is a chief ally of Rome? WA DC and Rome are indeed officially sister cities. Is it any wonder that fascism is so popular, even here? And so it’s the Beast and the image of the Beast which we face, and all the world is wondering after the Beast, and such is the dire nature of the situation that hardly anyone endeavors to understand such things anymore.
But there was a time when much of the world did understand, and that, by no mere coincidence, was the time of the rise of the Western World, or “Free World” as we used to call it, for the law of God is indeed the “perfect law of liberty” as Christ said.
It’s not just firearms, the whole concept is a mess. Birth control (without parental knowledge) for pre-teens but staying on your parents health insurance until 26. Join the military and vote at 18 but you can’t drink until 21.
Given that the goal of the left is to treat everyone as a child no matter his age, that all makes perfect sense… 🙁