When the Supreme Court declined to hear several cases dealing with gun rights for adults under 21 last month, the justices opted to leave unmended one of the biggest splits in post-Bruen litigation. Now, new lower courts are joining the fray.

In a new 76-page merits opinion, a Connecticut judge last week issued one of the most comprehensive decisions concerning gun-control restrictions on 18-to-20-year-olds to date. In the case Succow v. Blanche, US District Judge Sarala Nagala addressed restrictions in both state and federal law and touched on virtually every facet of young adult Second Amendment jurisprudence that have split various federal appellate courts, including purchase, carry, and possession bans.

Notably, Nagala upheld them all.

“Having considered all the admissible testimony of the witnesses and all the admissible documentary evidence, the Court finds that the State and Federal Handgun Restrictions do not violate Plaintiffs’ Second Amendment or Fourteenth Amendment rights, as they are consistent with this Nation’s history and tradition of firearms regulation,” she wrote.

Specifically, Judge Nagala upheld the collection of federal statutes that together ban licensed firearm dealers from selling pistols to adults younger than 21. She also upheld Connecticut’s state laws that ban all pistol sales to the same age group, including private transfers, and also ban 18-to-20-year-olds from even possessing or carrying an otherwise lawfully procured handgun.

Though such an outcome for each individual restriction is not unprecedented among lower court judges, it is the first to be so all-encompassing, something Nagala herself acknowledged while noting the sweeping nature of Connecticut’s restrictions on young adults.

“While the Connecticut Framework’s constitutionality is a matter of first impression in this Circuit, a number of Circuits post-Bruen have considered challenges to comparable state laws restricting the sale, possession, and/or carrying of handguns by individuals under the age of twenty-one, reaching various conclusions as to the constitutionality of such laws,” she wrote. “None of these circuit-level decisions have addressed the constitutionality of state laws that prohibit both the sale/purchase and the possession/carrying of handguns by those under the age of twenty-one, however.”

That all-encompassing ruling affecting the Second Amendment rights for young adults was only made possible by the Supreme Court’s refusal to take up one or more of the nearly half-dozen cases in its pipeline considering each of the very same issues at play in the Succow case, allowing Judge Nagala to effectively throw in her lot with one side of the open circuit split on each issue.

The federal handgun restrictions alone, for instance, have seen competing rulings and rationales from the Fourth and Fifth Circuits. A unanimous Fifth Circuit panel in January 2025 struck down the federal restrictions, in a ruling that the Justice Department later declined to appeal, after rejecting Reconstruction-era analogues as justification for the modern ban.

“The federal government has presented scant evidence that eighteen-to-twenty-year-olds’ firearm rights during the founding-era were restricted in a similar manner to the contemporary federal handgun purchase ban, and its 19th-century evidence ‘cannot provide much insight into the meaning of the Second Amendment when it contradicts earlier evidence,’” Judge Edith Jones wrote in Reese v. ATF.

Just six months later, however, a divided Fourth Circuit panel came down the other way after making much of the fact that persons under the age of 21 were considered “infants” at the time of Founding and often lacked contract rights.

“The infancy doctrine imposed a severe burden on a minor’s ability to purchase goods, including firearms, during the founding era,” Judge Harvie Wilkinson wrote in McCoy v. ATF. “Because § 922(b)(1) is ‘relevantly similar’ to founding-era restrictions on the commercial sale of firearms, we are satisfied that the Second Amendment permits the law’s burden on an 18-to-20-year-old’s right to purchase a handgun.”

In the Succow ruling, Judge Nagala essentially imported that same reasoning about the “infancy doctrine” as her sole justification for upholding the federal ban.

“The Federal Framework’s prohibition on the commercial sale and delivery of handguns to individuals between the ages of eighteen and twenty is consistent with the historical inability at the Founding for minors under the age of twenty-one to enter into contracts for the sale of commercial goods, given that minors were deemed to lack appropriate judgment and discretion,” Nagala wrote. “To be sure, Founding era infancy doctrine prohibiting minors from contracting for non-essential goods is not a ‘dead ringer’ for the Federal Framework. But that is of no matter, as courts need not search in vain for such a ‘historical twin,’ when there exists a sufficient analogue that ‘comport[s] with the principles underlying the Second Amendment.’”

Unlike the federal ban, the legal landscape for state-based age restrictions is less clear-cut. The en banc Eleventh Circuit, for instance, upheld Florida’s total gun sales ban to those under 21 in a March 2025 ruling that relied heavily on the infancy doctrine as well. However, a three-judge Tenth Circuit panel just four months prior upheld Colorado’s similar law after determining that commercial firearm purchases are not even covered under the Second Amendment.

“Pineda has partially met his burden at step one by demonstrating that (1) 18-to-20-year-olds fall within ‘the people,’ and (2) the arms he wishes to purchase constitute protected ‘arms,’” Judge Richard Federico wrote in RMGO v. Polis. “However, Pineda fails to prove that SB 23-169 implicates his right to ‘keep and bear’ arms, the third prong of step one. This is because SB 23-169 is presumptively lawful as a law that imposes conditions or qualifications upon the sale and purchase of arms and thus does not fall within the protections of the plain text of the Second Amendment.”

Meanwhile, both the Third and Eighth Circuits struck down bans on gun carry for 18-20-year-olds in Pennsylvania and Minnesota, respectively. Each court did so after rejecting justifications based on the infancy doctrine and Reconstruction-era analogues while emphasizing founding-era requirements that often required eighteen-year-olds to show up armed with privately-owned firearms for militia service.

“Minnesota cites common law evidence that (as minors) 18 to 20-year-olds did not have full rights. Minnesota, however, does not put forward common law analogues restricting the right to bear arms,” Judge Duane Benton wrote in Worth v. Jacobson. “Instead, Minnesota points to statutory law, such as the Militia Act of 1792 that required 18 to 20-year-olds to acquire firearms, as evidence the common law was the inverse. A mandate to acquire a firearm is hardly ‘evidence’ that one was previously prohibited from owning one.”

Judge Nagala, on the other hand, accepted late 19^th-century state laws that restricted the sale to or carry by under-21-year-olds as acceptable analogues for Connecticut’s all-encompassing ban.

“The State Defendants have placed into the record a number of Reconstruction era laws that operate to completely prohibit the possession and carrying of handguns by individuals under the age of twenty-one,” she wrote. “For example, in 1883, Wisconsin passed a total prohibition on minors, defined as individuals under the age of twenty-one, from ‘go[ing] armed’ with ‘any pistol or revolver,’ and requiring any law officer to ‘take from any minor, any pistol or revolver, found in his possession.’ That same year, Kansas passed a law making the possession of a pistol or revolver by a minor in any place a criminal misdemeanor. And Nevada, in 1885, similarly passed a law making the wearing or carrying of any ‘pistol . . . or other dangerous or deadly weapon concealed upon’ a person under the age of twenty-one a criminal misdemeanor.”

“As Defendants’ experts explained, these laws were enacted to combat the rising tide of juvenile crime and accidental shootings spurred by the increased availability of mass-produced, multi-firing, concealable handguns,” she added. “They thus serve as ‘dead ringer[s]’ for Connecticut’s current prohibitions on the carrying and possession of handguns by minors.”

Judge Nagala’s ruling is not itself precedential, but it could give rise to an eventual appeal before the Second Circuit, where yet another appellate court would have the chance to weigh whether young adults have the same constitutional rights as their older counterparts. Perhaps a Seventh Circuit court ruling will be sufficient “percolation” for the Supreme Court to consider the issue important enough to take on.

As the Succow decision makes clear, the issue isn’t going away any time soon and will need to be resolved eventually. And by the time the Court gets around to deciding whether adults under the age of 21 enjoy any protection by the Second Amendment, it will find that the lower courts have already built multiple fully developed—and fundamentally incompatible—bodies of post-Bruen law.