LAFAYETTE, La. — Properly composed lawsuits bringing a facial Second Amendment challenge share the characteristic of being as concise and simple as the enumerated right they propose to protect, and the recent lawsuit backed by Firearms Policy Coalition against Louisiana’s ban on carry for young adults is no exception.
The July 22 complaint known as Pool v. Hodges, filed in the United States District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, is only nine pages in length. It names two individual plaintiffs in addition to FPC, and is brought against Colonel Robert P. Hodges, the superintendent of the Louisiana State Police.
The suit challenges Louisiana’s Senate Bill 1, enacted in 2024, which expressly denies a large contingent of Louisianan adults from carrying a concealed firearm based solely upon their age, specifically those from 18 to 20 years old.
The complaint notes that not only are 18-to-20-year-olds part of the people, but “there is no historical tradition that justifies treating such adults on discriminatory footing compared with adults over 21 years of age.” Indeed, there is no other enumerated civil liberty in the Bill of Rights that has such a restriction.
In January of 2025, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals struck down a similar ban on carry for young adults in Pennsylvania. It was the Third Circuit’s second ruling on the case, after it was reversed and remanded by the Supreme Court to be heard in context of its own recent decision in Rahimi. The Third Circuit nonetheless came to the same conclusion – there is no constitutional basis to deprive some legal adults of their rights simply because of age.
“The Fifth Circuit has already made it crystal clear that peaceable 18-to-20-year-old adults are among ‘the People’ protected by the Second Amendment and enjoy the same right to keep and bear arms as every other adult. Yet Louisiana denies them access to the permits they need to fully exercise their right to bear arms in public, trapping them in a sprawling maze of invisible gun-free zones created and enforced through state and federal law. That is not constitutional carry – it is blatant constitutional infringement,” said FPC President Brandon Combs, in a media statement.
The complaint is brought on both Second and Fourteenth Amendment footings and seeks both summary judgment and a permanent injunction that enjoins enforcement of all aspects of the law.
