Another major Second Amendment victory has landed in a major state. In Eubanks v. State, 2026 WL 1740598 (Fla. 4th DCA 2026), the District Court of Appeal of the State of Florida, Fourth District, held on June 17, 2026, that Florida’s bar on 18-, 19-, and 20-year-olds carrying a concealed firearm is unconstitutional under the Second Amendment. The court vacated Jaylen Tyrus Eubanks’s conviction and struck down the age-21 requirement in Florida Statutes § 790.06(2)(b) as it applies to young adults. The Overton window keeps expanding in favor of the right to keep and bear arms, and this is a decision every gun owner in America should understand.
What the Court Actually Held
The opinion, written by Judge Spencer D. Levine and joined by Chief Judge Jeffrey T. Kuntz and Judge Shannon K. Shaw, framed the question plainly:
Can law-abiding adults aged 18 to 20 be prohibited from exercising their Second Amendment rights to self-defense available to other law-abiding adults? The plain text of the Constitution and our country’s history and tradition say no.
To restrict 18-to-20-year-olds — members of the same political community as every other law-abiding adult — would, the court reasoned, make the Second Amendment “a second-class right.” The provision was therefore held facially unconstitutional as it relates to that age cohort.
This matters even if you are not in that age range and even if you do not live in Florida. Every law-abiding American we add to the community of people actively exercising the right makes it politically harder for the other side to restrict that right for anyone.
Bruen, Applied Correctly
What I find most valuable here is the methodology. The court ran the Bruen framework exactly as the Supreme Court instructed in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1 (2022): plain text first, then history and tradition.
Because the Second Amendment presumptively protects the right of 18 to 20 year olds to the public carry of firearms, which includes concealed carry, then the burden shifts to the state to demonstrate that the regulation is consistent with this nation’s historical tradition of firearms regulation. This burden has not been met here by Florida.
The court got the definitions right too, drawing on District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008): “the people” means all members of the political community, and the right to bear arms includes carrying in public for self-defense. This is the architecture I have taught for years, now reflected in a published appellate opinion.
The Date That Decides Everything: 1791
For years I have argued — in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy and elsewhere — that the proper period for assessing the historical tradition of firearms regulation is 1791, when the Second Amendment was ratified alongside the rest of the Bill of Rights. You interpret a legal instrument by what it meant when it was adopted. The court embraced that view directly, noting that the scope of protection is “pegged to the public understanding of the right when the Bill of Rights was adopted in 1791.”
This is not a technicality. The anti-gun side wants the clock set to 1868 and the post-Civil War era, when far more gun-control laws appeared — many of them Black Codes and Jim Crow measures. In 1791, by contrast, firearms laws were sparse and largely confined to the misuse of arms. Anchoring to 1791 denies the other side its richest source of bad analogues.
The court also grounded its reading in founding-era sources. It cited William Blackstone’s Commentaries on “having and using arms for self-preservation and defense,” and it defined “infringe” using the lexicographers Samuel Johnson and William Perry’s Royal Standard English Dictionary (1788): to violate, destroy, or hinder. Because mere hindrance qualifies, the court held, denying young adults access to concealed carry “would certainly classify as a hindrance and as such an infringement.”
Minors Then, Adults Now — and a Telling Tension
Even granting, for argument’s sake, that 18-to-20-year-olds could have been treated as minors in 1791 — a premise I find historically shaky, given that the Militia Acts of 1792 required men 18 to 45 to enroll and furnish their own musket — the principle does not help the other side today. The historical principle would be that minors may be restricted. But today 18-to-20-year-olds are not minors. They vote, marry, sign contracts, and serve in the military. The court agreed:
We do not define adults today as starting at age 21 like adult was defined at the time of the founding. We define adulthood today in the world we know.
One tension is worth naming. The Eleventh Circuit, sitting en banc in NRA v. Bondi, 133 F.4th 1108 (11th Cir. 2025), upheld Florida’s age-21 firearm purchase ban under § 790.065. So Florida now has a purchase ban blessed by the federal court of appeals and a carry ban struck down by its own appellate court. That tension is unsustainable, and it runs in our favor. The carry side has the momentum — Worth v. Jacobson, 108 F.4th 677 (8th Cir. 2024), struck Minnesota’s 21-and-up carry-permit rule, and Reese v. ATF, 127 F.4th 583 (5th Cir. 2025), struck the federal ban on dealer handgun sales to young adults.
Credit is due to Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, who conceded the provision was unconstitutional, declined to defend it, and will not appeal. Brick by brick, the wall protecting the right to keep and bear arms gets higher — and Eubanks is another brick that courts across the country, up to and including the Supreme Court, can cite in our favor.
This article is based on analysis by Professor Mark W. Smith, constitutional attorney and Host of the Four Boxes Diner 2nd Amendment channel. Watch the original video here. This does not constitute legal advice.