Boston Judge Keeps Massachusetts’ Under-21 Gun Ban — Adults Who Can Vote Still Can’t Carry

U.S. District Judge George O’Toole in Boston upheld Massachusetts’ ban on 18- to 20-year-olds possessing handguns and semiautomatic firearms on Friday, August 21, 2026. Bearing Arms and Bloomberg Law reported the order in Escher v. Noble, No. 1:25-cv-10389 (D. Mass.). The plaintiffs include a 20-year-old resident who wanted a semiautomatic rifle and a handgun for public carry, plus the NRA and other gun-rights groups. O’Toole rejected the claim that the age floor turned the Second Amendment into a “second-class right,” writing that “that argument conflates regulation with relegation.”

The state’s Bruen analog was the founding-era infancy doctrine — limited legal capacity below the age of majority. Officials argued it was practically impossible for people under 21 to acquire firearms then, and pointed to militia statutes that made parents furnish arms to minors or pay a fine. O’Toole: the historical record shows the pre-existing right “codified” by the Second Amendment allowed restrictions on minors’ possession, and the statute “fits within that principle … in both why and how it burdens the Second Amendment right of eighteen- to twenty-year-olds.” He cited the 11th Circuit’s 2025 en banc decision upholding Florida’s under-21 sales ban and the 10th Circuit’s Colorado under-21 ruling that the founding-era age of majority was 21 in most states.

He also held the plaintiffs lacked standing on three of the four provisions they challenged. The merits holding that survived is the statute setting 21 as the minimum for a Massachusetts license to carry. An 18-year-old in Massachusetts is an adult for voting, contracts, military service, and criminal liability. This court located a tradition that withholds the one right written into the Bill of Rights. That is a district-court decision. The First Circuit sits above it.