Ian Haworth: What Is An Adult?

What is an adult?

Cornell Law School defines adulthood as follows:

An Adult is an individual who has reached the age of majority. The age of majority refers to the age at which a person will be defined by law to be an adult. This will be accompanied by the rights and responsibilities of adulthood. The age of majority varies from state by state and from country to country. Most countries have set the age of 18 being the age of majority.

In almost every state, 18 year-olds are adults. The only exceptions are Alabama, and Nebraska, where the age of majority is 19 years-old.

So, in general terms, you become an adult in the United States on your 18th birthday.

Then why is the definition of adulthood being arbitrarily twisted and redefined by a collection of “bipartisan” politicians under the guise of addressing “gun violence”?

Last week, the House passed a “sweeping” gun control bill — known as the “Protecting Our Kids Act” — that would raise the minimum age to purchase a so-called “assault rifle” to 21 years-old. While the bill passed 223 votes to 204 (with five Republicans supporting the proposed legislation), it’s — thankfully — dead-on-arrival in the U.S. Senate.

But twenty senators — ten Democrats and ten Republicans — celebrated their own “tentative agreement” over the weekend, outlining a framework of changes.

In one section, the framework calls for “enhanced background check for under 21 gun buyers and a short pause to conduct the check,” noting that “young buyers can get the gun only after the enhanced check is completed.”

Not only is the Republican support of this framework an example of ideological betrayal, the call to place further controls over legal adults in the United States is both arbitrary, discriminatory, and — on a dispassionate level — entirely ineffective.

Let’s consider the statistical reality of mass shootings. According to The Violence Project, 27.9% of mass shooters in their database used a “semiautomatic assault weapon,” noting that “the most common weapon used to commit mass shootings is a handgun,” with “80% of all mass shooters [using] at least one handgun during their crime.” Moreover, 46.5% of mass shooters legally acquired all their guns.

Next, let’s consider additional data from the Rockefeller Institute. Based on their database, the average age of mass shooters is 33.2 years-old, while 95.7% of mass shooters are male, and 54.8% of mass shooters are white.

In other words, the obsessive focus on “assault weapons” and those under 21 years-old is simply not backed up by the data. Indeed, it would be more statistically viable to discriminate based on sex and/or race. Given that doing so would be immediately rejected as discriminatory, why is the same not true for age?

In the United States, those in power want to disregard the measurable and concrete metric that is age in order to achieve their political objectives, by bastardizing the very definition of adulthood. Under their ridiculous system, 18 year-olds can be sent to war to do the violent bidding of those in Congress, but would not be permitted the same rights under the Second Amendment as their fellow adults. 

Meanwhile, on the other end of the spectrum, children as young as 14 years-old can get behind the wheel of a car in some states. Given that 42,060 people died in vehicle crashes in 2020, while there were 19,517 firearm homicides that same year, why are we not immediately addressing this crisis?

Let alone the fact that tens of thousands of children are tried as adults by our country’s judicial system every single year…

It’s time we decide — once and for all — what an adult is. If Congress wants 18 year-olds to die for them across the world, then they must be afforded the same rights as every other American adult. If not — if 18 year-olds aren’t adults as Congress seems to believe — then perhaps we should stop jailing them as such, or sending them to die in uniform?

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