Scholarship Highlight: Age Restrictions and Michael Bellesiles

The scholarship highlighted in this post does not necessarily represent the views of the Duke Center for Firearms Law.

In a new article forthcoming in the Indiana Law Journal Supplement, historian Kellen Heniford “describe[s] the changes in American society, economy, and politics that led to the passage of dozens of separate age-related [firearm] restrictions in the postbellum period.”  Heniford focuses on the social and historical context of how young people participated in American society, and she argues that the emergence of statutory gun restrictions “was a rational response to the emergence of youth gun violence and the collapse of the preexisting restraints on young people’s ability to obtain their own weapons.”

And in a short essay posted to SSRN, Seth Barrett Tillman documents a recent resurgence of judicial citations to work by Michael Bellesiles—a gun historian who fabricated research and had a prestigious history prize rescinded in 2002.  Tillman notes that, since 2021, courts have begun to cite some of Bellesiles’ work again, though he adds that he “cannot meaningfully explain this phenomenon with any confidence.”

Kellen Heniford, The Young and the Armed: History For Litigating Firearms Age Restrictions in a Post-Bruen World, 101 Ind. L.J. Supp. ___ (forthcoming 2025)

Abstract:

The Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling in New York State Rifle and Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen has dramatically reshaped Second Amendment jurisprudence. That decision, bucking precedent, created an entirely new, history-based standard for adjudicating the constitutionality of firearms restrictions and has led to a flurry of challenges to long-standing local, state, and federal gun laws. Among these challenges, cases involving age restrictions on the purchasing, possessing, and carrying of weapons have proven especially vexing to courts. While some recent rulings have validated age laws, others have come down on the side of the plaintiffs. At issue in these cases, per Bruen’s requirements, has been the question of an American “tradition” of limiting minors’ access to deadly weapons. 

This article seeks to provide a detailed account of the historical context surrounding the passage of age-based firearms restrictions in the decades following the Civil War. It argues that it was in the post-war Reconstruction years that the United States first faced a then-novel (but now-familiar) problem of youth gun violence and unintentional injury—a problem brought on by a confluence of several large-scale changes in American society and political economy. The focus here is narrowed to discuss transformations in the money economy of early America, which allowed those locked out of traditional barter and credit agreements to access markets; developments in labor practices and contract law that granted minors a degree of freedom and an ability to purchase for themselves that had been previously unimaginable; mechanization and industrialization, and their concomitant effects on the firearms industry’s mass production capacity; and, finally, the ways that gunmakers’ postbellum efforts to sell their products to new sectors of the market led to the targeting of children specifically.

In elaborating on this history, the present article speaks to Bruen’s admonition that “unprecedented societal concerns [...] may require a more nuanced analysis” of a regulatory tradition. When youth gun violence emerged as a novel social ill, lawmakers across the country moved to address it by passing regulations limiting young people’s access to firearms. Under Bruen, challenges to modern age-based regulations must contend with this wealth of historical evidence.

Seth Barrett Tillman, A Phenomenon in Search of a Theory / Recent Citations to Michael Bellesiles' Publications (2025)

Abstract:

I intend to describe a phenomenon. I do not intend to explain it. Perhaps others can do so. By way of background … Michael Bellesiles, a history professor at Emory University, published a variety of journal articles on gun ownership during the colonial era and post-independence period. In 2000, he published a book: Arming America. In 2001, it won the Bancroft Prize. In 2002, the prize was rescinded. It was rescinded in large part in response to scholarly criticism. Unsurprisingly, Bellesiles' articles and book influenced public debate, scholarship, and judicial opinions in regard to gun control. Bellesiles and his publications were once cited actively, and then such citations dried up. But now, it appears that his publications are being cited again.

Perhaps we should ask why?