According to Firearm Chronicles
Virginia’s new “universal background check” law violates the constitutional rights of state residents between the ages of 18-20, according to a decision by a circuit court judge Monday afternoon granting a partial injunction against the law that took effect on July 1st. That means that at the moment, only 18, 19, and 20-year olds are exempt from the requirement to undergo a background check before a private or commercial gun sale.
More broadly, however, Judge F. Patrick Yeatts determined that the law requiring background checks on all gun sales does not facially violate the state constitution’s protection of the right to keep and bear arms, so while the case winds its way through the court system, the new law is likely to remain in place (though still nearly impossible to enforce).
Yeatt’s decision, which can be read in its entirety here, hinges on the fact that federal law prohibits the transfer of a handgun from an FFL to someone under the age of 21. Virginia state law, however, doesn’t prohibit possession of handguns for adults under the age of 21. Private sales and transfers, though, are really the only way those young adults can legally purchase a handgun. The state’s new background check law, according to Yeatts, amounts to a backdoor handgun ban for those under the age of 21.
As to the constitutionality of the background check law itself, the judge found that:
“Even though private sales and commercial sales are different, the Court is at a loss as to how the historical justifications of preventing felons and the mentally disabled from possessing firearms would allow conditions on commercial sales and not on private sales. So long as the background check is limited to preventing a longstanding prohibition on a historically justified category, it does not violate the right to keep and bear arms.”