Stephens v. State of Georgia

Thomas Stephens, a 20-year-old Georgia man, applied for a weapons carry license but was denied because Georgia law generally requires a person to be 21 to carry a handgun in public. He sued the State, arguing that this age restriction violates the right to keep and bear arms found in the Georgia Constitution. Stephens did not argue that the law violates the U.S. Constitution's Second Amendment, and he did not try to show that the law is unconstitutional under the way Georgia courts have interpreted the state constitutional right for over 150 years. Instead, he asked the Supreme Court of Georgia to throw out that long line of precedent and replace it with legal tests borrowed from federal Second Amendment cases. A Lumpkin County superior court had already dismissed his case, largely relying on that same long-standing Georgia precedent. The Supreme Court of Georgia agreed with the trial court, holding that Stephens had not shown any real reason to abandon the state's traditional approach to the right to bear arms.

The court held that Stephens failed to meet the heavy burden required to overturn a state law as unconstitutional because he did not seriously argue that Georgia's century-old interpretation of the state constitutional right to bear arms is wrong, and instead only asked the court to replace that interpretation with federal legal tests, which the court declined to do.

The ruling means Georgians between 18 and 20 will continue to face the state's current restrictions on public handgun carry, while retaining rights to carry long guns, keep handguns at home or work, and use firearms in self-defense. It also reaffirms that Georgia courts will interpret the state constitution using its own history rather than automatically adopting federal legal tests.

Judgment affirmed

1. State laws are presumed constitutional, and a person challenging a law bears a heavy burden: he must show the conflict between the law and the constitution is 'clear and palpable' and the court must be 'clearly satisfied' the law is unconstitutional before striking it down.
2. The Georgia Constitution's right to bear arms includes a 'manner clause' giving the legislature power to regulate how arms are carried, and for over a century Georgia courts have held that such regulations are valid unless they are unreasonable, arbitrary, or amount in effect to a denial of the right to bear arms altogether.
3. Because this interpretation was developed before the current 1983 Georgia Constitution was adopted and has been repeatedly reaffirmed, there is a strong argument that it is now built into the meaning of the constitutional text itself, though the court did not need to resolve that question definitively.
4. To win, Stephens needed to show this long-standing interpretation does not match the original public meaning of the constitutional text as understood when it was ratified, but he offered no serious analysis of that original meaning and no alternative interpretation of his own.
5. Instead of engaging with Georgia's own constitutional history, Stephens asked the court to import federal legal tests, such as strict scrutiny or the U.S. Supreme Court's 'history and tradition' test for Second Amendment cases, a practice the Georgia Supreme Court has repeatedly criticized as inappropriate for interpreting Georgia's distinct constitutional language.
6. Because Stephens's entire claim depended on the court overturning its settled interpretation of the state constitutional right to bear arms, and he gave the court no compelling reason to do so, his challenge to the age restriction failed.

• gun rights
• handgun carry age limit
• Georgia Constitution
• weapons carry license
• Second Amendment comparison