A recent court decision adds Florida to the list of some 14 constitutional (“permitless”) carry states in which adults under the age of 21 may legally carry firearms.
Florida’s District Court of Appeal, Fourth District, has unanimously ruled that a statute restricting lawful carry to adults aged at least 21 years old is facially unconstitutional as it relates to 18- to 20-year-olds. Restricting 18- to 20-year-olds, who are members of the same “political community” as other law-abiding adults, “from rights to self-defense would make the Second Amendment a ‘second-class’ right,” and the court determined that “all those in the age of majority have the same rights to public carry, which includes the right to concealed carry.”
The law, Fla. Stat. 790.01, allows carrying of concealed weapons by unlicensed individuals who would otherwise satisfy the listed criteria for receiving and maintaining a carry license, including a minimum age of 21. Eighteen-year-old Jaylen Eubanks had been charged with a violation of that law after he was apprehended carrying a concealed handgun.
Eubanks moved to dismiss the carrying offense on the basis that a categorical ban on carrying a concealed firearm by those aged 18 to 20 was unconstitutional. The overall effect of the state law on the day of his arrest meant that Eubanks – like other 18-year-olds – had no lawful means to exercise the right to public carry, either concealed or openly (Florida’s open carry ban was subsequently invalidated in 2025).
The trial court denied the motion to dismiss and Eubanks appealed.
After reviewing landmark Second Amendment decisions from the United States Supreme Court as well as cases from lower courts on similar bans, the appellate court concluded first, that those aged 18 to 20 fell within “ordinary, law-abiding, adult citizens . . . [who] are part of ‘the people’ whom the Second Amendment protects.” This presumptive protection meant that the government, as directed by NYSRPA v. Bruen, was required to justify the carry law as consistent with the nation’s historical regulation of firearms, and it failed to do so.
Unlike the time of the Founding, current law no longer defines “adults” as those aged at least 21. “We define adulthood today in ‘the world we know,’” meaning 18- to 20-year-olds are “analogous to legal adults at the time of the Founding, not legal minors.” No Founding-era analogues were presented that supported a carry ban on 18- to 20-year-olds; in fact, then as now, “[a]ll those who reach the age of 18 are able, and encouraged, for example, to join the military to defend our country.”
These 18- to 20-year-olds “can defend the country without restriction but can only utilize their Second Amendment right to self-defense with severe restrictions. This burden on law-abiding 18- to 20-year-olds’ right to public carry—and specifically here concealed carry—which is not applicable to any other adults, is a burden that is facially unconstitutional.”
This burden, moreover, could not be justified on the basis of the supposed “dangerousness” of young adults as a class. In United States v. Rahimi, the U.S. Supreme Court had previously “rejected the theory that an individual, and thus a group of individuals, could be subject to being disarmed “simply because he is not ‘responsible,’” and the Florida court similarly declined to “deem a subset or category of people as dangerous based solely on rank belief.”
No historical analogue “would place 18- to 20-year-olds in the same category as felons, the mentally ill, or domestic violence offenders.” (The Supreme Court’s ruling in United States v. Hemani was issued after the Florida court decided Eubanks, but the Hemani Court refused to uphold a broad gun possession and acquisition ban applicable to the defendant as an unlawful user of marijuana absent a proper historical analogue based on “unusually dangerous individuals.”)
Finding that no set of circumstances existed in which the Florida statute could be constitutionally enforced against 18- to 20-year-olds, the court vacated the defendant’s conviction. The decision is Eubanks v. State of Florida, No. 4D2025-1698 (Fla. Dist. Ct. App. June 17, 2026).
In more good news, Florida’s Attorney General James Uthmeier (who had earlier refused to defend the young adult carry ban law) celebrated the decision as “another win for the unalienable rights of Floridians,” where the court “agreed with our position that Florida’s law banning adults under 21 from conceal carrying a firearm is unconstitutional.” He advised his office will not be seeking further review in the case and will work “to implement the court’s order.”
Another Florida law continues to prevent law-abiding young adults from exercising the same gun rights as those available to other adults in the state, but there are positive signs in that case as well. A year ago, the NRA filed a petition for certiorari in NRA v. Glass, asking the U.S. Supreme Court to rule on the NRA’s challenge to Florida’s flat ban on firearm purchases, of any kind, for any purpose, by 18-to-20-year-olds. This class is among “the people” protected by the Second Amendment, and the appropriate historical analogues, those “that come closest to reflecting a ‘Founding-era policy on age and firearms’ [are] militia laws throughout the Nation obliging eighteen-year-olds to muster for militia service bearing firearms they were legally obligated to acquire for themselves.” As was the case in Eubanks, this “should have been the beginning and the end of any suggestion that Florida’s age ban ‘is consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.’”
In a refreshing turn of events, the brief filed on behalf of the respondent Mark Glass, the Commissioner of the Florida Department of Law, agrees: the “Court should grant certiorari and hold that 18-to-20-year-olds have a Second Amendment right to purchase firearms,” adding that, although the State defended the constitutionality of its law previously, “Florida’s Attorney General announced shortly after taking office that, in his view as the State’s chief legal officer, the law violates the Second Amendment... the Commissioner of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement has likewise concluded that the law is unconstitutional.” The Supreme Court has yet to decide whether it will hear the appeal in Glass, and lawsuits challenging age-based restrictions on carrying and purchasing by young adults are pending elsewhere across the country. Your NRA will keep you informed as to new developments on this and other important cases.
More Like This From Around The NRA
