As of this writing, an otherwise-eligible nineteen-year-old in Broward County may lawfully carry a concealed handgun that she may not lawfully buy, not from a licensed dealer, not from a private seller, not from anyone. Both halves of that sentence carry an appellate blessing. Both courts applied the same constitutional test. Both were construing the laws of the same state against the same founding-era record. And neither opinion is sloppy work. That last part is the story.
The defendant with no lawful option
In 2024, Broward County officers responding to a report that someone had pointed a handgun at a vehicle detained Jaylen Eubanks, then eighteen, and found an unholstered handgun on his waist. He was charged with carrying a concealed firearm in violation of section 790.01(3), Florida Statutes, a third-degree felony.
Walk through what the law offered him then, because the walk is short. Florida’s 2023 “permitless carry” law authorizes license-free concealed carry only for a person who satisfies the licensing criteria of section 790.06(2). That cross-reference imports subsection (2)(b) wholesale, and subsection (2)(b) requires that the applicant “[i]s 21 years of age or older.” Open carry was a separate crime under section 790.053, for every age. So an eighteen-year-old Floridian in 2024, qualified in every other respect, had no lawful mode of public carry at all. It was a box with three walls. He could not carry concealed with a license (too young; § 790.062 spares only servicemembers and veterans, and Eubanks was neither), concealed without one (the same age floor, imported), or openly (then criminal across the board). Eubanks moved to dismiss on Second Amendment grounds, lost, pled no contest reserving the dispositive motion, and received a withhold of adjudication, Florida’s conviction-that-isn’t.
Between his plea and his appeal, one wall of that box cracked. In September 2025, the First District held the open-carry ban unconstitutional under the Second Amendment, McDaniels v. State, 419 So. 3d 1180 (Fla. 1st DCA 2025), and the Attorney General followed with a guidance memorandum. His office, as Eubanks describes it, “will no longer defend prosecutions under the open carry statute.” Yet the Eubanks panel rested nothing on any of that. A sister district’s opinion is “merely persuasive,” so section 790.053 “remains presently valid and potentially enforceable in this district.” Note what that means, because it is a data point for everything below. A single criminal statute was held unconstitutional in one of Florida’s six appellate districts, disowned by the state’s chief legal officer in all of them, and still enforceable where Eubanks was standing.
The trial courts underneath are a stranger story still. Under Pardo v. State, 596 So. 2d 665, 666 (Fla. 1992), a district court’s decision binds every Florida trial court in the absence of interdistrict conflict. That would make McDaniels the law in Broward’s trial courts too, except that the Fourth District’s own pre-Bruen decision upholding the open-carry ban, Norman v. State, 159 So. 3d 205 (Fla. 4th DCA 2015), approved, 215 So. 3d 18 (Fla. 2017), arguably supplies exactly the conflict that suspends the rule. McDaniels pronounced Norman no longer controlling after Bruen; Norman nonetheless remains the last word from the Fourth District and the Florida Supreme Court themselves. Whether a Broward trial judge is bound by her own district’s pre-Bruen yes or a sister district’s post-Bruen no is, as far as I can tell, an open question. So the patchwork does not just run district by district. It runs court by court, within a single county.
On June 17, the Fourth District Court of Appeal reversed. Eubanks v. State, No. 4D2025-1698 (Fla. 4th DCA June 17, 2026). The panel was unanimous, and the holding is broader than the usual criminal reversal. Applying the facial standard of Abdool v. Bondi, 141 So. 3d 529, 538 (Fla. 2014), the court held section 790.06(2)(b) “facially unconstitutional as it relates to 18- to 20-year-olds,” because “no set of circumstances exists” under the statute in which that cohort may carry concealed. The court opened by asking whether law-abiding adults aged 18 to 20 may be barred from the self-defense rights other adults hold, and answered that “[t]he plain text of the Constitution and our country’s history and traditions say no.”
Note who stood where. The Attorney General’s office, through Acting Solicitor General DeSousa, conceded error, agreeing the disposition could not stand “because appellant is guaranteed a means of public carry under the United States Constitution.” The statute’s only defender was the Broward State Attorney’s Office, appearing as amicus curiae, arguing that under-21s were minors at the founding and that the cohort misuses firearms at disproportionate rates.
That office’s posture deserves weight, not a punchline. Parkland is in Broward County. On February 14, 2018, a nineteen-year-old murdered seventeen people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School with a rifle he had purchased lawfully the year before. Within weeks the Legislature passed the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Act. Its firearms centerpiece is section 790.065(13), which reads, “A person younger than 21 years of age may not purchase a firearm.” The carry-age floor Eubanks struck is an older feature of the licensing statute; the purchase ban is Parkland’s statute. The prosecutors who stood alone to defend an age line in that county were not working from an abstraction, and nothing in this post treats their position as one.
The control group
The purchase ban has its own appellate history, and it is the other half of the opening sentence. The NRA challenged the MSD Act in federal court in 2018, and seven years later the en banc Eleventh Circuit upheld it. NRA v. Bondi, 133 F.4th 1108 (11th Cir. 2025) (en banc). Chief Judge William Pryor, writing for an eight-judge majority over four dissenting votes, first recast the challenge (“their challenge is to the law as applied only to individuals between the ages of 18 and 21”) and then did serious historical work. At the founding, a person remained an infant in the eyes of the law until twenty-one. An infant’s contracts, except for necessaries, bound no one, and pistols and powder were not necessaries. His wages belonged to his parents. Even the militia laws, the challengers’ best material, cut Bondi’s way on the purchase question. By 1826, at least twenty-one of the twenty-four states placed the burden of arming their 18-to-20-year-old militiamen on the young men’s parents. On the threshold question, the court was careful to a fault, writing that “we assume, but do not decide, that individuals under the age of 21 are part of ‘the people’ protected by the Second Amendment.”
Same state. Same cohort. Same test, Bruen’s demand that the government produce a founding-era analogue “relevantly similar” in how and why it burdens the right, as softened into principles by Rahimi. Same founding record, sitting in the same archives. Opposite outcomes. Read together, the two opinions leave Florida law telling the same nineteen-year-old that she may carry it on the same terms as any other adult, and that she may buy it nowhere.
Where the discretion lives
It would be easy, and wrong, to conclude that one of these courts botched the assignment. The more uncomfortable reading is that both did the assignment correctly, and the divergence lives in two moves the method requires but does not govern. Each opinion presents those two moves as findings.
First, the choice of analogue. Eubanks reaches for the Second Militia Act of 1792, which required able-bodied men to enroll in the militia and, in the Third Circuit’s words the panel adopted, to “arm themselves upon turning 18” — “good circumstantial evidence of the public understanding at the Second Amendment’s ratification.” Bondi reaches for Blackstone and the law of infancy until twenty-one, with its contractual incapacity, necessaries, parental control of wages, and parental duty to arm the militiaman son. Both bodies of material are genuinely of the founding. Nobody fabricated a source; nobody misquoted a statute. The record simply contains both, and the test supplies no rule for choosing between a tradition in which eighteen-year-olds were required to be armed and a tradition in which they could not buy so much as a pistol on their own credit.
Second, the characterization of the modern law. Eubanks writes that “the thrust of the regulation is on age and not on the manner of carry, that being concealed carry.” Call the carry floor an age law, and it stands naked in front of the militia acts, which armed this exact cohort. Bondi characterizes the purchase ban as a transaction law (commerce, contract, capacity), and it settles comfortably beside the law of infancy. Neither characterization is forced. Each is reasonable. And each is outcome-dispositive. Recharacterize either statute’s thrust and that case comes out the other way. The test’s advertised constraint sits precisely on top of its largest degree of freedom.
The steelman, in full
Concede everything the seam’s defenders would ask. The line between acquiring arms and bearing them is a real common-law line, not a litigator’s invention. Bondi’s Florida leaves 18-to-20-year-olds free to possess, use, and be given firearms. As the dissenters themselves put it plainly, “Florida allows young adults to possess and use guns if they can get them.” And Eubanks distinguishes the purchase cases on exactly that ground, noting they “address whether young adults can purchase firearms,” not whether adults aged 18 to 20 may keep and bear them. Chief Judge Pryor’s infancy scholarship is genuine founding-era material, assembled with care; the Eubanks panel’s militia history is the same. A coherent lawyer can hold both opinions in one hand. I hold them in one hand.
The claim here is not that either court cheated. The claim is about what the pair of opinions proves when you set them side by side. A method was sold as constraint, as the alternative to “judge-empowering” interest balancing. It has now produced, in a single state, through two applications each defensible on its own terms, a regime in which 799,015 Floridians (the Census Bureau’s Vintage 2024 estimate of the state’s civilian population aged 18 to 20) hold a constitutional right to carry handguns that no lawful market may supply to them.
And Florida is not an outlier; it is the national pattern in miniature. Applying the same test to the same history, the Eighth Circuit struck Minnesota’s carry-age floor, Worth v. Jacobson, 108 F.4th 677 (8th Cir. 2024); the Third Circuit struck Pennsylvania’s statutes insofar as they banned 18-to-20-year-olds from carrying during declared states of emergency, Lara v. Comm’r Pa. State Police, 125 F.4th 428 (3d Cir. 2025); and the Fifth Circuit struck the federal ban on dealer handgun sales to under-21s, Reese v. BATFE, 127 F.4th 583 (5th Cir. 2025). Meanwhile the Fourth Circuit upheld that identical federal ban, McCoy v. BATFE, 140 F.4th 568 (4th Cir. 2025); the Tenth let Colorado’s purchase age stand at the preliminary-injunction stage, Rocky Mountain Gun Owners v. Polis, 121 F.4th 96 (10th Cir. 2024); and the Eleventh upheld Florida’s. That scoreboard is not evidence of bad faith in any chambers. It is evidence that the test underdetermines its answers. That is a different thing from constraint, and the difference is the point.
A finding that was an assumption
One detail in Eubanks makes the indeterminacy visible at the smallest scale, and it deserves a scrupulous paragraph. Distinguishing the en banc Eleventh Circuit, the Fourth District writes that even Bondi “found” that 18-to-20-year-olds are among “the people” the Second Amendment protects, citing 133 F.4th at 1130. What Bondi actually wrote, quoted above, is “we assume, but do not decide.” An assumption became a finding somewhere in transit between Atlanta and West Palm Beach.
This is ordinary citation drift, the kind every busy panel commits and every honest lawyer has committed; it changes nothing about the Eubanks holding, which does not depend on what the Eleventh Circuit thought. But notice where it happened. It came in the very passage where the state court manages its disagreement with the federal en banc court, on the precise threshold question dividing courts nationally. When a method’s outputs turn on characterization (of statutes, of analogues, of what a sister court held), even the opinions about the opinions start to wobble. The overread is not a scandal. It is the diagnosis, performing itself in a citation.
The referee’s week
Then look at the calendar, because the timing is almost too neat. Yesterday, June 18, one day after Eubanks, the Supreme Court decided United States v. Hemani, 608 U.S. ___ (2026), holding 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(3) unconstitutional as applied to a marijuana user, the government’s founding-era analogues having failed, on the majority’s own how-and-why metric, to reach him. Two members of the majority (Justice Jackson, joined by Justice Sotomayor) wrote separately to call Bruen “unworkable.” Within twenty-four hours, a Florida district court of appeal and the Supreme Court of the United States had each demonstrated, in different keys, how much of this test is played by ear.
And the age question itself is sitting at that Court right now. NRA v. Glass, the petition from the Bondi judgment, is docketed and has been distributed, and it is not alone; WVCDL v. ATF is pending alongside it. Whatever the Court does with those petitions (grant, deny, relist) will be its first word on whether it wants this question. As of this writing there has been no word at all.
The Glass petition carries a distinctly Florida flavor. In August 2025, the Attorney General’s office filed a response urging the Court to take the case and strike down Florida’s own statute. Florida has asked the Supreme Court to rule against Florida; whether the Court will rule at all remains an open question.
Add it up, and then stop adding. The split the Court’s own test created has ripened, been briefed, and now sits on the Court’s doorstep. What it does there is not something this post will predict.
The gift economy
So here is the ground truth for Florida’s 18-to-20-year-olds, as of June 19, 2026. Within the Fourth District they may carry concealed on the same terms as other adults. The same holds in every Florida trial court statewide, since district court decisions bind all trial courts absent interdistrict conflict. Pardo v. State, 596 So. 2d 665, 666 (Fla. 1992). The Attorney General has said his office will work with the licensing agencies to implement the ruling rather than seek further review (announcement of June 2026). Open carry is its own patchwork. It was held unconstitutional in the First District by McDaniels, is undefended by the Attorney General anywhere, and is still on the books and potentially enforceable in the Fourth (Eubanks said so while reversing). The purchase ban stands. Bondi upheld it, and the petition asking the Supreme Court to disturb it is still awaiting an answer. Federal law still bars dealers from selling them handguns everywhere outside the Fifth Circuit, where Reese controls.
Which leaves acquisition. A Florida nineteen-year-old’s constitutionally protected handgun can reach her hands through exactly three channels the law smiles upon. It can come as a gift, a loan, or an inheritance. The right to keep and bear arms is held by 799,015 adult Floridians, confirmed by a unanimous appellate panel, and conceded by the state’s own chief legal officer. For its first three years, it is exercisable at grandmother’s discretion.
Where the argument stops
The honest paragraphs, before the close. Eubanks is two days old, a slip opinion with its rehearing window open, by its own terms “[n]ot final until disposition of timely-filed motion for rehearing” (though with the only losing party having conceded error, it is hard to see who moves). Its formal reach is the Fourth District plus Pardo’s trial-court gravity; another district could yet disagree. And the door to the Florida Supreme Court is not theoretically ajar. A district court decision declaring a state statute invalid falls within that court’s mandatory appellate jurisdiction, art. V, § 3(b)(1), Fla. Const., an appeal of right the State has announced it will not take. The Legislature could redraw the purchase side of the seam. The House has passed a bill lowering the purchase age to 18 for rifles and other long guns (most recently in January of this year, and by press accounts for the fourth consecutive session), and the Senate has refused each time. Note, though, that the bill reaches only long guns. Her handgun would still arrive by gift, loan, or inheritance, and federal law would still bar the dealer’s counter outside the Fifth Circuit. And I should say plainly that I am not a Second Amendment specialist; my practice is elsewhere, and this post claims nothing beyond what the opinions, the statutes, and the dockets say on their faces.
The indeterminacy critique has a fair answer, and it deserves stating rather than burial. Rahimi instructed courts to consult the principles underlying the founding-era regulations, not to hunt for twins. And a principles-level jurisprudence could, in time, converge. Settle what “the people” means, settle the acquisition/bearing line, settle the level of generality, and the discretion I have been describing narrows. That is a genuine possibility, not a talking point. But observe the evidence to date. Bondi and Eubanks are both post-Rahimi opinions; both cite Rahimi; both diverged anyway, at the two forks Rahimi left unmapped. And whether the Court will say which principle governs this cohort is, as of this writing, a question sitting unanswered on its docket. Convergence remains a promise. The split is a fact.
The measurement
On June 17, a Florida court held that the Constitution guarantees a nineteen-year-old a means of public carry, and it was right by its lights. Fifteen months earlier, eight federal judges held that Florida may forbid her to buy the thing she carries, and they were right by theirs. Every tribunal in between did careful, documented, footnoted work, and the sum of all that care is a right with no market beneath it, a constitutional guarantee whose exercise now waits on a birthday or a bequest.
That result is not a scandal, and this post has not called it one. It is a measurement. A method advertised as taking the judge out of the judgment has been run, at full rigor, by its most conscientious practitioners, on the same laws and the same archive. And the outputs diverge at exactly the joints where the method lets the judge choose. Until the Court says otherwise, the acquisition of a constitutional right in Florida runs on the gift economy.
Update, July 1, 2026: The Court answered on June 30 and denied certiorari in Glass and in every other pending age case, in a single order list. The docket explains the long silence. Distributed twice in the fall of 2025, Glass then sat until Hemani came down, was redistributed for the June 25 and June 29 conferences, and was denied the next day. It was held, then released, then declined. The purchase ban stands; the seam stands with it. Full coverage appears in The Referee Declines.
The authorities: Eubanks v. State, No. 4D2025-1698 (Fla. 4th DCA June 17, 2026) (slip opinion; not final until disposition of any timely motion for rehearing); NRA v. Bondi, 133 F.4th 1108 (11th Cir. 2025) (en banc) (Bondi, Lara, McCoy, and McDaniels reporter citations as printed in Eubanks); New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1 (2022); United States v. Rahimi, 602 U.S. 680 (2024); United States v. Hemani, 608 U.S. ___ (2026); Worth v. Jacobson, 108 F.4th 677 (8th Cir. 2024); Lara v. Comm’r Pa. State Police, 125 F.4th 428 (3d Cir. 2025); Reese v. BATFE, 127 F.4th 583 (5th Cir. 2025); McCoy v. BATFE, 140 F.4th 568 (4th Cir. 2025); Rocky Mountain Gun Owners v. Polis, 121 F.4th 96 (10th Cir. 2024); McDaniels v. State, 419 So. 3d 1180 (Fla. 1st DCA 2025); Norman v. State, 159 So. 3d 205 (Fla. 4th DCA 2015), approved, 215 So. 3d 18 (Fla. 2017); Abdool v. Bondi, 141 So. 3d 529 (Fla. 2014); Pardo v. State, 596 So. 2d 665 (Fla. 1992); §§ 790.01, 790.053, 790.06(2)(b), 790.065(13), Fla. Stat. Quotations were verified against the Eubanks slip opinion, the Bondi en banc opinion as filed, the Hemani slip opinion, and the current statutory text, read in full. The population figure is from U.S. Census Bureau, Vintage 2024 single-year-of-age estimates (civilian population, July 1, 2024).
John J. Lloyd is a Florida attorney and the creator of the FLexlaw legal research platform.