ATLANTA – Nearly 200 years of legal precedent should not apply to a 20-year-old man who wants to carry a gun, his lawyer argued before the Georgia Supreme Court on Tuesday.
Thomas Stephens, who turns 21 next year, was denied a license to carry a handgun in public when he applied for one in Lumpkin County. He sued, and his case made it to the high court, which heard arguments by his lawyer and by the state attorney general’s office. The state contends in a legal brief that the restrictions on adults under age 21 are “baked into the Georgia Constitution.”
Stephens’ lawsuit goes to the heart of one of the most contentious issues in America today: how to interpret gun rights under the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. It says, “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” An introductory phrase has been a complicating factor, saying that a “well regulated Militia” is needed to secure a free state.
Georgia’s constitution elaborates by saying that the legislature “shall have power to prescribe the manner in which arms may be borne.”
A lawyer from Attorney General Chris Carr’s office argued that the state’s age-based limitations date back to the Civil War era, when he said those under 21 were not subject to militia service.
“The court should stick with the analysis that it’s applied for 180 years,” said Zachary A. Mullinax, an assistant attorney general. “I don’t think that there is any historical evidence that an 18-year-old had the right to carry a handgun in public.”
But Stephens’ lawyer made the case that Georgia’s restrictions are rooted in a time before courts began applying a higher standard on government intrusion into personal liberties.
The state Supreme Court has based its decisions on a “reasonable” exercise of government power to limit access to guns, said John R. Monroe, the Dawsonville attorney representing Stephens.
That was before the World War II era, when the U.S. Supreme Court first developed a higher standard of “strict scrutiny” and began requiring that burdens on fundamental rights be justified by a “compelling” state interest, Monroe said. “Strict scrutiny should be applied to this case because it’s a fundamental right for people to keep and bear arms.”
It’s unclear how the state’s high court will rule. The justices peppered both lawyers with questions, although Justice Andrew A. Pinson told Monroe early in the hearing that he had an “uphill battle” to make his case. That is due to the history of Georgia’s restrictions on gun rights, Pinson said, “which we’ve said arguably is now baked into our constitutional language given that it was enacted and then we ratified new constitutions with that same language.”