SAF Urges Supreme Court to Reject Lifetime Gun Bans for Nonviolent Felons
The Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) joined the National Rifle Association in filing an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in Johnson v. United States, urging the Court to review the Tenth Circuit’s decision upholding a lifetime federal firearms ban for nonviolent felons.
Joseph Frederick Johnson is challenging 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(1) as applied to a peaceable person. The Tenth Circuit treated Heller’s reference to “presumptively lawful” felon prohibitions as conclusive and foreclosed an as-applied challenge. The brief argues that Bruen and Rahimi require every arms regulation – including those Heller called “presumptively lawful” – to be justified by historical tradition. That tradition supports disarming only dangerous persons, not everyone whose offense happens to be classified as a felony.
“Heller’s ‘presumptively lawful’ line was never a blank check for a lifetime ban on every peaceable American with a felony on his record,” said SAF Director of Legal Research and Education Kostas Moros. “Historically, we disarmed dangerous people. We did not strip the Second Amendment right from those who broke the law without violence and then went back to living as ordinary, peaceable citizens. A permanent ban with no path to restoration is simply not how our tradition worked.”
Colonial and Founding-era restrictions targeted people thought to pose a threat: wartime enemies, rebels and those with a proven proclivity for violence. Ratifying conventions spoke of “peaceable citizens” and of disarmament only for those “in actual rebellion” or who presented “real danger of public injury.” After Shays’s Rebellion, Massachusetts required rebels to surrender arms and then allowed them to reclaim those arms within months. Militia laws required able-bodied men to keep arms and contained no exemption for prior nonviolent convictions. Some statutes even expressly protected criminals’ arms from seizure for debt.
“A conviction for a nonviolent offense should not automatically require a lifetime forfeiture of a person’s right to keep and bear arms,” said SAF Executive Director Adam Kraut. “The historical tradition as applied here requires only those who are deemed “dangerous” be disarmed. A nonviolent felony mistake should not require a lifetime ban on exercising someone’s Second Amendment rights. We encourage the Court to grant this petition and make clear that § 922(g)(1) cannot be applied to peaceable people the historical tradition never disarmed.” Read more
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