Florida Judge Strikes Down Under-21 Gun Carry Ban

The Sunshine State can not criminalize the general public carrying of firearms by adults solely on the idea of their age, a state courtroom decide has dominated.

Broward County Circuit Decide Frank Ledee on Friday dismissed a felony cost filed towards a 19-year-old Florida man for unlawfully carrying a hid firearm. He decided {that a} state regulation barring individuals below age 21 from carrying hid weapons, as utilized to the defendant, runs afoul of the US Structure.

“Hid carry is an extension of the best to bear arms, and historic restrictions might not justify denying adults this potential for self-defense based mostly solely on age,” Ledee wrote in Florida v. Walkes. “Florida’s overbroad restriction on the hid carry of firearms by eighteen-to-twenty yr previous’s violates the Second Modification.”

The ruling provides to the rising intrigue surrounding Florida’s gun legal guidelines. Whereas Friday’s resolution will solely impression one explicit defendant for now, it arrives as state and federal courts alike are contemplating whether or not to overturn the so-called Gunshine State’s restrictions on sure forms of gun-carry and age limits for gun buying.

The current Broward County opinion stemmed from a March 2025 police encounter with 19-year-old Joel Walkes III. In keeping with the opinion, Walkes was in a disabled car when police stopped to supply help. Officers observed a bulge in Walkes’ waistband through the encounter, which the 19-year-old admitted was a loaded semi-automatic handgun.

Although Florida is a permitless carry state, that means that typically anybody eligible to own a firearm can also carry it hid, it doesn’t prolong that coverage to anybody below 21.

After studying of Walkes’ age, officers confiscated the pistol and arrested him on one depend of carrying a hid firearm, a third-degree felony punishable by as much as 5 years in jail. Walkes’ public defender then moved to have his cost dismissed on Second Modification grounds.

Decide Ledee held that the conduct in query, carrying a firearm in public, match squarely below the plain textual content of the Second Modification. Subsequently, he wrote that it was the state’s burden to “affirmatively show that the prohibition is constant this Nation’s historic custom of firearm regulation.”

The state provided up examples of late Nineteenth-century state legal guidelines that restricted the sale of firearms to adults youthful than 21. It additionally pointed to legal guidelines that limit the identical age group’s entry to different merchandise on the idea of a societal view of their maturity, akin to alcohol and tobacco.

Decide Ledee, nonetheless, rejected these proposed analogues, stating “the State has failed to hold its burden.”

“The state has didn’t determine Founding-era regulation that broadly prohibited the hid carry of firearms by eighteen-to-twenty yr olds,” Ledee wrote. “The state additionally didn’t cite to any historic regulation imposing a burden or justification corresponding to Florida’s hid carry ban as utilized to eighteen-to-twenty-year-olds.”

“Merely said, Florida’s hid carry ban as utilized to eighteen-to-twenty yr olds successfully nullifies the age group’s potential to train their constitutionally protected proper to self-defense by hid carry,” he concluded.

The Broward County State Lawyer’s Workplace didn’t reply to a request for remark.