Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) introduced legislation Thursday to lower the legal minimum age for handgun purchases to 18.
He observes that an age of 18 is the threshold one has to cross to exercise the right to vote, thereby making an additional wait of three more years for Second Amendment rights arbitrary at best.
In other words, an artificially graduated approach to the exercise of constitutional rights is a violation of the very essence of such rights.
Massie’s bill is titled the Second Amendment for Every Registrable Voter Act.
He tweeted:
On February 16, 2018, just two days after the Florida school shooting, Rep. Massie urged a repeal of federal restrictions that hinder a school teacher from exercising his or her Second Amendment rights on K-12 campuses. He said, “Gun-free zones are invitations to deranged criminals. Why on earth would we have a federal law to advertise our schools as such? The 1990 law has done absolutely nothing to improve school safety, and should be repealed because it makes schools less safe.”
In 1776 Thomas Jefferson wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”
Massie’s position is simply that “unalienable rights” are being alienated by arbitrary, top-down rules that keep 20-year-old mothers from buying a handgun for self-defense and prevent teachers from carrying a handgun in the classroom for school safety.
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News, the host of the Breitbart podcast Bullets with AWR Hawkins, and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com. Sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange.