Minnesota AG considers asking U.S. Supreme Court to review age limit on permits to carry firearms

A federal appeals court has refused to listen to further argument from the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office in the latest legal blow to the state’s age restrictions for permits to carry firearms publicly, while the office may ask the U.S. Supreme Court to consider its appeal.

Citing new Supreme Court precedent, U.S. District Judge Katherine Menendez last year declared Minnesota’s ban on carry permits for adults ages 18-20 unconstitutional because it was not consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of firearms regulation.

Menendez relied on a precedent established in the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling striking down New York’s ban on carrying guns in public. That came one year after three young adults and a trio of gun-rights advocacy groups sued Minnesota’s public safety commissioner and the sheriffs of the plaintiffs’ respective counties — Douglas, Mille Lacs and Washington — arguing that the age restrictions violated their Second Amendment rights.

Menendez clarified that the age restriction must stand until all appeals in the case are exhausted. Last month, a three-judge panel of the Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with Menendez’s decision in part because it concluded that Minnesota failed to “proffer sufficient evidence to rebut the presumption that 18- to 20-year-olds seeking to carry handguns in public for self-defense are protected by the right to keep and bear arms.”

In response, Attorney General Keith Ellison’s office asked the full panel of Eighth Circuit judges to rehear its appeal – which the court denied last week.

John Stiles, deputy chief of staff for Ellison’s office, said the state is still considering whether to petition the U.S. Supreme Court to hear its appeal.

“We are extremely disappointed the 8th Circuit did not grant our petition so that the court could apply the brand-new guidance from SCOTUS in Rahimi to the facts of our case,” Stiles said in an email Monday. “We are still weighing our appeal options with our client.”

Though acknowledging that Minnesota may yet attempt to advance its appeal to the nation’s highest court, leadership from the Second Amendment Foundation — one of the three advocacy groups that sued over the age restrictions — hailed last week’s Eighth Circuit denial as “another victory in our ongoing effort to win firearms freedom one lawsuit at a time.”

“As we contended all along, the right of the people mentioned in the Second Amendment was not limited to those over a certain age,” said Adam Kraut, the group’s executive director. “Certainly young adults fall within the definition of ‘the people’ ever since they’ve been allowed to vote, and generations before that when they were considered part of the militia, and have been accepted into the military.”

Ellison’s office has said that 30 states and the District of Columbia have similar restrictions in place.