Why it matters: A Justice Department legal opinion says the Gun Control Act's age-21 limit on dealer handgun sales cannot be criminally enforced, though the statute itself is unchanged. Colion Noir's video on it walks viewers through what the opinion does and does not do, and points them toward Congress, the courts and the Florida Legislature for the rest.
Colion Noir has published a video responding to the Justice Department's conclusion that the federal ban on licensed dealers selling handguns to 18- to 20-year-olds is unconstitutional. The segment is built around a clip from an Action News Jax report out of Jacksonville, Florida, in which a gun store's firearms manager and two residents say the handgun age should stay at 21. Noir argues the opposite, and spends part of the video on the limits of what the department's opinion changes.
What the DOJ opinion on under-21 handgun sales says
The opinion, released September 18 by the department's Office of Legal Counsel, concludes that 18 U.S.C. § 922(b)(1) and (c)(1) violate the Second Amendment as applied to law-abiding 18- to 20-year-olds. Those provisions bar federally licensed dealers from selling handguns and handgun ammunition to anyone under 21. The department says it may not constitutionally seek criminal penalties against dealers for those sales. Federal law already allowed dealers to sell rifles and shotguns to buyers 18 and older.
Assistant Attorney General T. Elliot Gaiser, who leads the office, summarized the reasoning in the announcement: "Eighteen-year-olds may vote, serve on juries, be drafted, and face adult criminal penalties, including capital punishment." The announcement says the office found no Founding-era tradition of barring legal adults from buying firearms to protect public safety, and that militia statutes at the Founding "overwhelmingly required service beginning at 18 and required enrollees to furnish their own arms."
Colion Noir answers a Florida gun store's case for 21
In the clip Noir plays, Z Farhat, firearms manager at Green Acres Sporting Goods, says the store has followed Florida law since the state raised its purchase age in 2018. "It should stay 21," Farhat says of handguns, adding that long-gun purchases could return to 18 if buyers first completed a hunter safety or firearms safety course. Two residents in the same report, Henry Williams and Patrick Pritchett, also favor keeping the age at 21. Williams cites "too much violence going on"; Pritchett says people are a little more mature at 21.
Noir opens the video by noting that the man arguing for 21 sells guns for a living. The main response is a consistency argument. Eighteen-year-olds vote, choose the politicians who run the country and are given some of the most important jobs in the world, Noir says, and asks where the maturity line is supposed to sit. On Farhat's safety-course idea, Noir says nobody asks for a civics course before someone walks into a voting booth.
The video frames the choice as all or nothing: treat 18-year-olds as adults across the board, or move voting, drinking and gun purchases to 21 together. Noir says the same reasoning applies to the drinking age. "They're an adult or they're not," Noir says. The video then turns to the department's militia-statute finding, arguing that the generation that wrote the Second Amendment required 18-year-olds to own a firearm.
“The opinion changes what federal prosecutors will do, not what the statute says.”
Coleman Reyes, The ReticleA second argument concerns young adults living on their own. Noir describes people who leave home, or are pushed out, at 18 and can only afford housing in higher-crime neighborhoods, the same violence the residents in the clip point to. The handgun limit, Noir argues, leaves them living with that risk without the means to buy a handgun from a dealer for self-defense.
What the DOJ opinion does not change for under-21 buyers
The video then spells out the opinion's limits. It is a legal opinion, the video notes; the 1968 statute is still on the books, Congress has not repealed it, and a future administration could reverse the department's position. Florida viewers are told nothing has changed for them yet, because state law still sets 21 for buying a gun from a dealer. Noir calls the result "a win written in pencil" and names the permanent fixes as repeal by Congress or a Supreme Court ruling striking the law down.
The video also points Florida viewers to Attorney General James Uthmeier. Responding to the opinion, Uthmeier wrote that the attorney general's office took the same position at the Supreme Court a year ago and looks forward "to working with the Florida Legislature to right this wrong." Noir tells viewers to call and hold state officials to that.
The last minutes of the video argue that the Second Amendment is treated as the one right that comes with an asterisk, then move into a promotion for an "America" hat from the channel's store. The video closes by asking viewers to like, comment and share it, saying politicians and tech platforms do not want gun content recommended.
For context
- The Gun Control Act of 1968 set the federal minimum age at 21 for buying a handgun from a licensed dealer and at 18 for rifles and shotguns.
- In January 2025 the Fifth Circuit held the handgun-sale limit unconstitutional for 18- to 20-year-olds in Reese v. ATF, the Justice Department did not seek Supreme Court review, and the Fourth Circuit upheld the same law in McCoy v. ATF.
- An Office of Legal Counsel opinion sets the Justice Department's legal position; it does not bind courts or remove a statute from the books.
- Florida's 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Act raised the state's minimum age to buy any firearm to 21, and Attorney General Uthmeier has declined to defend its long-gun provision against an NRA challenge.
