I’m of the opinion that if someone is too dangerous to be trusted with their gun rights, they’re too dangerous to be walking among the rest of us. After all, violent people don’t need guns to kill others, so why are you letting them hobnob with the rest of us if they’re that dangerous even today?
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But the law sees it differently, and worse than that, it also keeps non-violent felons disarmed, even though their crimes had nothing at all to do with violence in the first place, and there’s usually no evidence they’ll become violent after serving their sentences.
It’s stupid, but it’s where we are and where we have been for quite some time.
Like me, though, the Firearms Policy Coalition thinks it’s time for this stupidity to end, and they’re asking the Supreme Court to end it.
Firearms Policy Coalition (FPC) joined the National Rifle Association, FPC Action Foundation, and Second Amendment Foundation in urging the Supreme Court to strike down the federal lifetime gun ban for nonviolent offenses in a critical new brief filed today in Duarte v. United States.
As FPC and its allies argue in the brief, “Historically, nonviolent criminals—including nonviolent felons—who did not demonstrate a propensity for violence retained the ability to exercise their right to keep and bear arms.” Indeed, they noted, “some laws expressly allowed or even required them to keep and bear arms. Certiorari should be granted to establish that the Second Amendment forbids the disarmament of peaceable Americans, including nonviolent felons.”
“Never in our history has any government had the authority to permanently disarm an individual for non-violent crimes,” explained FPC President Brandon Combs. “The lifetime federal ban of today would have been unthinkable to the Founding Fathers. The Supreme Court should grant review in this and other cases to restore the right to keep and bear arms of all peaceable Americans.”
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Under the Bruen decision, the Supreme Court previously set the history, text, and tradition standard, which is what gun laws have to meet in order to be considered constitutional. Rahimi “clarified” it to mean that it doesn’t need to be a perfect one-to-one analog, but that’s not particularly relevant here.
See, historically, there were laws at the time of the founding meant to keep guns out of dangerous hands. People couldn’t carry a gun while drunk, for example.
That will likely be used to justify the ban on violent criminals having guns. I’ve said my piece on this, but that’s the justification that would likely be used.
But non-violent felons aren’t dangerous. There’s nothing in the record to suggest otherwise. There’s no historic precedent for keeping them disarmed, especially for life, because of non-violent offenses.
And let’s understand that some of these felonies are things like bouncing a check above a certain dollar amount or something like tax fraud, which I still think shouldn’t be a crime but a civic duty.
These people aren’t a danger to anyone except their spouse’s sanity, at most. There’s no reason they should be prohibited from exercising their Second Amendment rights, especially as so many people don’t even blink about giving them their right to vote back.
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Editor’s Note: After more than 40 days of screwing Americans, a few Dems have finally caved. The Schumer Shutdown was never about principle—just inflicting pain for political points.
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