The Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel released a legal opinion Wednesday concluding that federal law barring licensed dealers from selling handguns to adults ages 18 to 20 cannot be enforced consistent with the Second Amendment.
The opinion, dated Sept. 17, 2026, addresses 18 U.S.C. §§ 922(b)(1) and (c)(1), which generally prohibit federally licensed dealers from selling handguns or handgun ammunition to individuals under 21. The Office of Legal Counsel found the statutes inconsistent with the Second Amendment as interpreted by the Supreme Court in District of Columbia v. Heller, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, and subsequent decisions including this year’s Wolford v. Lopez.
“Our laws deem an eighteen-year-old ‘mature enough to be drafted, vote, serve as a juror, and be sentenced to death,'” the opinion states, noting that an 18-year-old represented the United States at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics in skeet shooting, even though it would have been a federal felony for a licensed dealer to sell her a handgun before or after that competition.
“Eighteen-year-olds may vote, serve on juries, be drafted, and face adult criminal penalties, including capital punishment,” said Assistant Attorney General T. Elliot Gaiser, who heads the Office of Legal Counsel. “The Constitution protects the people’s right to keep and bear arms. The Department of Justice may not constitutionally seek to impose criminal penalties on dealers who sell handguns to law-abiding adults who, in nearly every other relevant respect, are members of the political community.”
The opinion applies the Supreme Court’s two-step framework from Bruen, first asking whether the Second Amendment’s plain text covers the conduct at issue, and if so, whether the government can show the restriction is consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.
On the first step, the opinion concludes that 18- to 20-year-olds are among “the people” protected by the Second Amendment, that handguns qualify as “arms” in common use, and that the age restrictions burden the ability to keep and bear those arms by closing off the primary commercial market to that age group. The opinion notes that the Twenty-Sixth Amendment, which lowered the voting age to 18 in 1971, reinforces that 18-year-olds are full members of the political community, and it points to the historical link between arms-bearing and other markers of civic membership such as voting and jury service.
On the second step, the opinion states that the government cannot show a historical tradition supporting the restrictions. It notes that Founding-era militia statutes, including the Militia Act of 1792, required men beginning at age 18 to enroll in the militia and furnish their own weapons — the opposite of a restriction on firearm access. The opinion reviews several potential historical analogues, including common-law rules that allowed minors to void contracts, mid-to-late-19th-century state laws restricting firearm sales to minors, 19th-century college conduct codes, and rules barring “infants” from serving as constables, and concludes that none establishes a sufficiently similar historical tradition to justify the modern restrictions.
The opinion acknowledges that federal appellate courts have divided on the question, citing conflicting decisions including Reese v. ATF, which invalidated similar restrictions, and McCoy v. ATF and NRA v. Bondi, which upheld them. The Office of Legal Counsel states that it does not believe those contrary decisions can be reconciled with more recent Supreme Court rulings in Hemani and Wolford.
The opinion notes several limits on its scope. It does not address age-neutral conditions on commercial firearm sales, the existing prohibition on handgun possession by those under 18, or the enhanced background-check waiting period Congress established for purchasers under 21. It also does not address the constitutionality of the same statute as applied to sales to individuals under 18, stating that such individuals may still be subject to certain legal disabilities under the historical tradition discussed in the opinion.
The Office of Legal Counsel concludes that Section 922(b)(1) and (c)(1) “may not be enforced to impose criminal penalties on dealers who sell handguns, the ‘quintessential self-defense weapon,’ to a class of law-abiding adults who in nearly every other domain are full members of the political community.”
