Delaware Lost in Court. Appealed Anyway. Now 18-Year-Olds Could Be Criminals.

A Delaware Superior Court struck down House Bill 451 in September 2025. The state Department of Justice looked at that ruling and appealed anyway — straight to the top.

Oral arguments landed before the Delaware Supreme Court this week. The question on the table: can the state make it a crime for a legal adult to own a handgun?

HB 451, passed in 2022, does exactly that. If you're 18, 19, or 20 years old in Delaware, purchasing or possessing most firearms is a criminal offense. Shotguns and muzzle-loaders get a narrow carve-out. Handguns — the most common self-defense firearm in America — do not.

**The same adults who can sign an enlistment contract, deploy to a war zone, and carry an M4 cannot buy a pistol to protect their apartment. Let that land.**

The state's legal theory is breathtaking in its arrogance. DOJ attorney Kate Aaronson told the justices the lower court failed to give the General Assembly enough "deference" — translation: courts should rubber-stamp whatever restrictions lawmakers dream up instead of applying the Constitution. "The legislature is far better equipped to make policy judgments... about the threat that firearms actually pose," Aaronson argued.

That is not a legal argument. That is a demand that courts step aside and let politicians do whatever they want with your rights.

Delaware also leaned hard on the brain-development talking point — the assertion that because the prefrontal cortex isn't "fully developed" until 25, 18-to-20-year-olds can't be trusted with firearms. By that logic, we should claw back their voting rights, their military service, and their contracts too. Nobody in Dover is proposing that.

The absurdity gets sharper. The same law exempts 18-to-20-year-olds who already hold a concealed carry permit. So under HB 451, a 19-year-old *can* carry concealed — but *cannot* legally purchase the gun on their hip. That is not a safety policy. **That is a bureaucratic Catch-22 deliberately engineered to turn young adults into criminals.**

Pushing back in court: the Delaware State Sportsmen's Association, the NRA's Delaware affiliate, and the Bridgeville Rifle & Pistol Club. Their argument is clean and constitutional — 18-year-olds are legal adults, the Second Amendment protects their rights, and post-*Bruen*, any restriction must trace to a historical tradition of firearms regulation. A blanket handgun ban on adults has no such tradition.

The Delaware Supreme Court now decides whether to resurrect a law a lower court already put in the ground. If it reverses, law-abiding young adults in Delaware become criminals overnight — not for anything they did, but for owning a firearm the Constitution explicitly protects.

**Watch this docket.** If Delaware wins, every blue-state AG from Annapolis to Sacramento has the blueprint. This isn't just one state's fight.