WHAT IS THE AGE OF MAJORITY?

It depends on who benefits by raising it or lowering it, notes David Harsanyi.

This is less about mendaciousness than it is about contemporary liberalism being a giant game of Calvinball. Numerous high-profile Democrats support the idea of allowing 16-year-olds to participate in the most vital, sacred, indispensable rite of democracy: voting. Then again, when it comes to government-mandated health care insurance, they believe that Americans should be treated like children until they’re 26-year-olds. But they also seem perfectly fine with 18-year-olds joining the Armed Forces — but not with the same men and women buying a drink or practicing the right to self-defense.

In the real world, maturity differs from person to person, from place to place. The average age of the mass shooter, after all, is 33. But if we’re going to come up with an arbitrary year that marks the beginning of adulthood, it should remain consistent. If you’re ready to vote you’re ready to practice all your rights. Of course, the notion that the founders would have been shocked by an 18-year-old carrying a firearm — a claim I get a lot — is also nonsense. The “teenager” is a 20th-century invention. In the 19th century, you were a child and then you were an adult. And adulthood began early.

Currently, the eighteen year olds in the military only get to use true military grade weapons under the supervision of noncoms and superior officers.  That's the argument primarily Democrats, primarily from urban areas, make for limiting the access of teenagers to what they call "long weapons."  That argument is unlikely to play well in hunt country, and I wonder what sort of contortions those politicians will engage in to distinguish permissible deer rifles, some of which are more powerful than the scary looking stuff the odd mass shooters use, from impermissible assault weapons.  Should make for some interesting theater.

There might be other dimensions of adulthood that Our Political Masters could define.  Joanne Jacobs has some fun with those.

Two years, John Rodgers, a Vermont state senator, proposed raising the minimum age for cellphone use to 21, reported Maria Cramer in the New York Times.

“In light of the dangerous and life-threatening consequences of cellphone use by young people, it is clear that persons under 21 years of age are not developmentally mature enough to safely possess them,” he wrote.

A gun rights advocate, Rodgers was mocking a 2018 Vermont law banning the sale of firearms to most people under 21.

“There are all these pushes around some parts of the country for 16-year-olds to vote but we’re saying they’re not mature enough to smoke or purchase a gun. So which is it?” said Mr. Rodgers. “When are you really an adult?”

So far, at least, nobody has suggested that if eight year olds can request puberty blockers, the age of majority ought to be eight.  Recall, dear reader, that religious practices dating to long before we were prosperous enough to conceive of adolescense set the age of professing one's faith through baptism, confirmation, or mitzvah at twelve or thirteen.  In contemporary practice, that puts baptism or confirmation class right at the age of maximum susceptibility to peer pressure.  That's for the churchmen to worry about.  Years ago, I laid down a marker in favor of "old enough to serve, old enough to quaff," to wit: "I'm taking this opportunity to endorse the Amethyst Initiative, which intends to make the legal drinking age the same as the legal voting age (and of draft age: with both major party candidates speaking of calling the young to "service" that's not for intellectual completeness alone)."  So let it be with weapon ownership as well, although I would not object to the Fish and Game authorities conditioning issuance of hunting licenses on evidence of having passed range and field safety courses.