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From Wiki:
"The Twenty-sixth Amendment (Amendment XXVI) to the United States Constitution prohibits the states and the federal government from using age as a reason for denying the right to vote to citizens of the United States who are at least eighteen years old. It was proposed by Congress on March 23, 1971, and three-fourths of the states ratified it by July 1, 1971.

Various public officials had supported lowering the voting age during the mid-20th century, but were unable to gain the legislative momentum necessary for passing a constitutional amendment.

The drive to lower the voting age from 21 to 18 grew across the country during the 1960s, driven in part by the military draft held during the Vietnam War. The draft conscripted young men between the ages of 18 and 21 into the armed forces, primarily the U.S. Army, to serve in or support military combat operations in Vietnam.[1] A common slogan of proponents of lowering the voting age was "old enough to fight, old enough to vote".[2] "



If you are old enough to be drafted - 18
then you are old enough to:
- enter a contract
- get married
- serve on a jury
- smoke
- vote
- buy a gun
- buy booze
- porn
--- note in some places (in certain establishments), an 18 yr old can be fully naked, but can't drink there.

Note the people didn't move the draft age up to 21.

And. some have proposed dropping the voting age ...


IIRC, justification for raising the drinking age from 18 to 21 is that 18 yr olds are more likely to give booze to those under 18 .... 18 for many is still High School


A question I ask from time to time:
When is someone an adult?

Religious -- 13/14 Bar Mitzva, confirmation,
Driving 16 (14 if on a farm)
...

there are a number of moving standards. I think I saw one in another thread this week - about charging children as adults in violent crimes.

We can't have 300 million standards -- when is a person mature
So what can we have, and why isn't there just one?



You may know some as I do, where 27 is not old enough to be a functioning mature adult.
* not to include those with diagnosed mental illness, which still needs to have consideration.
You can look up the current Brittney Spears conservatorship controversy, which I think is on point here.
 
Given my experience in working closely with 18-20 year olds in the military, I personally do not have much confidence in their maturity or judgement. That was 40+ years ago though and maybe the US military is more discerning about who they let enlist? I can't say for sure, but just from some of the FB posts from my old station (Yaquina Bay), they do seem to be better about training/etc.

That said, if a person is old enough to vote (again, questionable for 18-20), enter into a contract, enlist or be drafted (I do not support the draft) and carry firearms in defense of the country, then they have the right to purchase and carry firearms in their own defense as civilians. OTOH, I have felt for some time, that all of those should maybe be moved up to 20+ years of age due to lack of maturity.

There is the issue of maturity of the brain - and I think at 18-20 the teen brain is still maturing, especially with regards to impulse control. I know I had problems with impulse control into my early 20s, while noticeably more mature than the teens I worked with in the USCG. OTOH, some of that can be taught, but I don't think today's society is teaching teens how to make good judgements (vs. "at the time of the founding" - I would trust an 18 year old from that time much more than I would trust many of our 18 year olds today - simply due to having more real world experience and independence due to their environment).

So finally, that does not mean that some people, 18-20, are not able to be adults - I just think it is a grey area. We all know examples on both sides of this issue. I also know people that have never really matured that are my age, but I think as people grow older that percentage grows smaller.
Strange how "children" could take up arms and die fighting the British and now the thought of them possessing that same right today is seen as problematic.

Some simple data could prove or disprove your concerns. Montana allows 18 year olds to conceal carry. If your concern has merit, Montana should have a significantly higher ratio of shootings by people 18-21 who are legally carrying guns. I've never seen a story about that before, and I'd assume if that were the case it would be heavily used by the anti crowd toward their disarmament argument.
 
Strange how "children" could take up arms and die fighting the British and now the thought of them possessing that same right today is seen as problematic.

Some simple data could prove or disprove your concerns. Montana allows 18 year olds to conceal carry. If your concern has merit, Montana should have a significantly higher ratio of shootings by people 18-21 who are legally carrying guns. I've never seen a story about that before, and I'd assume if that were the case it would be heavily used by the anti crowd toward their disarmament argument.
Would you want the 18 year old snowflakes in Seattle to be running around with guns?

I did not say I was opposed to it, I inferred I am on the fence given my experience with 18-20 year old people in the military - these were teens I would say that had more maturity than many of today's teens. I also said I would have more confidence in a teen from 1776 than I would in the general 18 year old today.
 
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Would you want the 18 year old snowflakes in Seattle to be running around with guns?

I did not say I was opposed to it, I inferred I am on the fence given my experience with 18-20 year old people in the military - these were teens I would say that had more maturity than many of today's teens. I also said I would have more confidence in a teen from 1776 than I would in the general 18 year old today.
18 year olds (and younger) who want to do bad things with guns, already get guns to do bad things with. Just like with all laws, the people who don't need them to begin with wouldn't be a problem anyway, and the people who are a problem, won't follow them anyway.

The logic is simple, old enough to die for your country, old enough to have all rights.
 
And as I also said, I believe many 18-20 year olds are too immature for enlistment or the draft, or to vote, or to drink. It is a gray area.
I agree. I personally know three people right now that are 18-20 and have never even tried to take the driver's test.
 
Same can be said for today's 30 year olds.
An argument can be made that as a sample of the population increases in age, the % of that population that is "mature" is greater. The question is, is it a sufficient % to be allowable. The logical extension would be to say, some 12 year olds have sufficient maturity to buy & carry handguns - but the percentage would be so low as to be exceptionally small. So where is the line drawn.

Personally, like I said, I have misgivings about 18-20 year olds having handguns as I think a significant percentage of them are not mature enough, but OTOH we do allow them most other rights of consenting adults.
 
Strange how "children" could take up arms and die fighting the British and now the thought of them possessing that same right today is seen as problematic.

Some simple data could prove or disprove your concerns. Montana allows 18 year olds to conceal carry. If your concern has merit, Montana should have a significantly higher ratio of shootings by people 18-21 who are legally carrying guns. I've never seen a story about that before, and I'd assume if that were the case it would be heavily used by the anti crowd toward their disarmament argument.
Yes we do, and it's quickly becoming a problem. With permitless carry I've seen some of the most horrific carrying techniques and by folks that really look like trouble/tweakers. Almost nightly now. Common sense dictates that we train and are given licenses for dangerous activities to be performed around others. And no, today's 18 year olds aren't generally old enough to do much of anything. 18 was set for military just so we had an excuse to send even more people to their demise for a ridiculous war.
 
Yes we do, and it's quickly becoming a problem. With permitless carry I've seen some of the most horrific carrying techniques and by folks that really look like trouble/tweakers. Almost nightly now. Common sense dictates that we train and are given licenses for dangerous activities to be performed around others. And no, today's 18 year olds aren't generally old enough to do much of anything. 18 was set for military just so we had an excuse to send even more people to their demise for a ridiculous war.
Your experience with 18 year olds isn't indicative of all 18 year olds, there are many 18 year olds who are not the same level of ignorance and lack of maturity typically showcased by the media portraying them today or found in inner cities where many 18 year olds have no real world responsibilities because that has been how they have been raised. Remember - kids learn primarily based on how they are raised, if we have multiple generations of moronic pussies it is primarily because their parents allowed them to develop that way.

Kids who grow up in houses where they are expected to demonstrate responsibility and contribute meaningfully to the family's general benefit, they exercise responsibility and experience far beyond peers who grow up in households where adult children are pampered nearly the same as when they were young children.

Specifically bringing the conversation back to guns. People intent on committing crime or being involved in the criminal side of life were already carrying guns without any permit, and if you passed by them in your daily life you wouldn't have observed that they were. The people who are now legally carrying "permitless" as the constitution intended, because rights don't require permits - those people are exercising their right to carry same as you may regularly do. If they lack experience compared to you, then yes they could improve that with time, but we all started somewhere. I know significantly more now and have more experience now in this stage of my life than I did 10 years ago. I would assume, logically, this is the same for most people. The manner in which I carry and my experience with carrying has also changed with time (experience) and the amount of firearm experience I have now is significantly more than it was 10 years ago.

Where I view the core of your viewpoint is flawed is that it seems to presuppose that your freedoms are more important than their freedoms, compared to what I am suggesting at the core of my argument is that freedom is exercised by everyone, and not everyone exercises it with the same degree of competence, but that is their right to exercise it regardless, and with time, it would likely improve beyond that moment in time that you witnessed them.

I generally despise arguments related to restricting rights that are founded upon elitism in training, that notion is terrible because it first postulates the right does not exist (because rights are inalienable), secondly, because what is "good enough" for one person, is "chump status" for another. If a right is capable of being restricted based upon an arbitrary skill level, (first ignoring the presupposition of what a "right" is in the first place) then with that argument an arbitrary skill level of Jerry Miculek can become the legal standard with which you are "allowed" to carry a gun - and then only Jerry and possibly a handful of others get to legally carry a gun.
 
Correct ruling. You don't get to withhold constitutional rights from people just because you think you have a good
Who's the "you"? (Because technically it's all of us ) No actually you (or we, or the government) can infringe on constitutional rights, but it can only be done following certain rules. The fourth circuit thought Congress went too far on this one. The fifth circuit sees it differently. Maybe 18 to 20 year olds' rights really aren't infringed because they can buy long guns. I've always thought this to be a dumb law.
Ambulance Chasers have cost America more in blood and treasure than firearms, can we ban lawyers?
And they've saved millions of consumers from damgerous products, so maybe treasure, but not blood. People like to bag on plaintiff's lawyers, but if an accident, that was someone elses's fault, put a critic in a wheelchair indefinitely, my guess is that critic would be shopping for the best he could find.
 
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Your experience with 18 year olds isn't indicative of all 18 year olds, there are many 18 year olds who are not the same level of ignorance and lack of maturity typically showcased by the media portraying them today or found in inner cities where many 18 year olds have no real world responsibilities because that has been how they have been raised. Remember - kids learn primarily based on how they are raised, if we have multiple generations of moronic pussies it is primarily because their parents allowed them to develop that way.

Kids who grow up in houses where they are expected to demonstrate responsibility and contribute meaningfully to the family's general benefit, they exercise responsibility and experience far beyond peers who grow up in households where adult children are pampered nearly the same as when they were young children.

Specifically bringing the conversation back to guns. People intent on committing crime or being involved in the criminal side of life were already carrying guns without any permit, and if you passed by them in your daily life you wouldn't have observed that they were. The people who are now legally carrying "permitless" as the constitution intended, because rights don't require permits - those people are exercising their right to carry same as you may regularly do. If they lack experience compared to you, then yes they could improve that with time, but we all started somewhere. I know significantly more now and have more experience now in this stage of my life than I did 10 years ago. I would assume, logically, this is the same for most people. The manner in which I carry and my experience with carrying has also changed with time (experience) and the amount of firearm experience I have now is significantly more than it was 10 years ago.

Where I view the core of your viewpoint is flawed is that it seems to presuppose that your freedoms are more important than their freedoms, compared to what I am suggesting at the core of my argument is that freedom is exercised by everyone, and not everyone exercises it with the same degree of competence, but that is their right to exercise it regardless, and with time, it would likely improve beyond that moment in time that you witnessed them.

I generally despise arguments related to restricting rights that are founded upon elitism in training, that notion is terrible because it first postulates the right does not exist (because rights are inalienable), secondly, because what is "good enough" for one person, is "chump status" for another. If a right is capable of being restricted based upon an arbitrary skill level, (first ignoring the presupposition of what a "right" is in the first place) then with that argument an arbitrary skill level of Jerry Miculek can become the legal standard with which you are "allowed" to carry a gun - and then only Jerry and possibly a handful of others get to legally carry a gun.
A to the FRIKEN men!
 

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