Quote of the Day
For too long, countless Americans with criminal histories have been permanently disenfranchised from exercising the right to keep and bear arms—a right every bit as constitutionally enshrined as the right to vote, the right to free speech, and the right to free exercise of religion—irrespective of whether they actually pose a threat. No longer.
Pam Bondi
U.S. Attorney General
July 18, 2025
Office of Public Affairs | Justice Department Publishes Proposed Rule to Grant Relief to Certain Individuals Precluded from Possessing Firearms | United States Department of Justice
See also Trump admin proposes major change to gun laws.
This has been a sore point for a lot of people. Technically, there was a process for doing this (18 U.S.C. 925(c)) but congress defunded it in the 1990s. It was challenged in court, and we lost.
The worst story I have heard about this is an elderly black guy who had a felony conviction from many decades ago for having a deck of cards with semi-nude pictures of white women on them. No other brushes with the law, and he was denied the right of effective self-defense.
There are probably thousands of other stories with non-violent convictions of people who led a good and productive life for decades and were never able to own or handle a gun.
It is a bit ironic, and I’m not going to say who it is, but there is a very well-known gun rights professional who had a felony conviction for income tax evasion. They were able to get their gun rights restored before the process was defunded. Very few people were as fortunate as this person was.
It is just another small brick in the wall, but this probable change is very pleasing to me.
I’ve not problem with any of them getting their 2A Rights restored after they finish their sentance. If they are “safe” to release back into society, then they ought to be safe enough to own a gun. IF they aren’t safe enough to have a gun, why were they let back into society in the first place? Not as if they couldn’t use a knife, blunt object, or a motor vehicle to injure or kill, and that’s even ignoring the fact that they could unlawfully obtain a firearm.
One they’ve paid their “debt” to society, that should be it…not a lifetime of being a “second class” citizen. And if what they did was so heinious, then make the sentance longer.
I’d really prefer if we were seriously honest about what were were doing when we make someone a lifetime prohibited person. Not second class citizen; in effect, demotion to permanent resident.
At the time of the Founding, this would have been a practice of ‘internal exile’. All the effects of being kicked out of the country, without having to physically leave the country. Frankly, we’d be honest if we went back to this: keep a fine dividing line between “incarceration, then stay in until you find a country that will take you because you can’t be here” and “incarceration, then we let you out but you’re a permanent resident non-citizen non-alien with an option to re-naturalize”. Re-offenders of the second type turn into the first type.
I didn’t know of “internal exile” as a US practice. I know it only as something done in ancient Rome — Cicero is the best known example of one who was subjected to that treatment.
Permanent prohibited status is worse than being demoted to permanent resident, because as far as I know permanent residents can own guns.
English law had the practice of banishment as an alternative to capital punishment. The Crown was banishing people to the Americas and Australia up through the middle 1800s. When the US was founded, it inherited the state of British common law, rather than having to build an entire structure of legal basis from scratch. Even today, there are cases argued in from of SCOTUS that reference Blackstone’s commentary on English law as the common law basis for US law. The exception is anything passed by Congress that overrides the English common law basis, or Constitutional prohibitions on a English practice (of which there are many, see most of the Bill of Rights).
So, without black letter law that says we can’t do exile as a punishment, we could. It’s unusual, but not cruel unless we require them to go somewhere where we know they would be tortured or killed on arrival. If we make it “internal” exile, well, we’re no more cruel than we are to any other person, and we’re not unusual.
As for permanent residents, they don’t have rights protected by the Second Amendment, since they aren’t of the People. Yes, we generally say the right to bear arms is a human right that should not be infringed, but that’s not what the Second Amendment requires. Non-citizens have to get an Alien Firearm License, which is not unconstitutional even if it is immoral by our stronger stance on the general right when applied to peaceable persons.
However, we’re talking about un-peaceable persons: how to deal with. At one end is the Texan “He needed killing”, which solves the problem of recidivism rather firmly. Next is “Don’t let them out if they can’t be trusted with a gun, because there’s no real way to keep them from getting a gun”, which is basically life sentences until proven reformed, which is expensive. Next is my proposal of exile: thugs can’t thieve our air. Next is prohibited person/internal exile, which is less expensive and runs up against several objections about public risk, practicalities and rights.
This is what I like to tell my trainees is an “engineering problem”: there are costs to every solution and you can’t have everything.
I don’t disagree with you. But that isn’t the case I want made in the courts and legislatures at this time.
Nor do I. We have other cases that will restore rights to larger numbers of people, other cases that will make it harder or (one hopes) impossible for them to infringe on our 2A Rights again. Leaving that group’s issue until later isn’t indifference, just triage. But we ought not to forget it, and we ought to remind ourselves that it is there, and perhaps we might want to remind some of our fellows who at first blush are indifferent to that issue of the principle of the matter.
The lifetime denial of Second Amendment rights to those who have served a sentence and been released is absurd. If Second Amendment rights can be denied to those people, then why not other Amendment rights? No more 4th Amendment right requiring an inconvenient warrant before searches, no more taking the 5th, no more 6 A speedy trials, etc. What a boon for “law and order.”
Someone who can’t be trusted to own a firearm can’t be trusted to walk the streets.
This isn’t complicated.