Matthew Cavedon
“Why can’t Martha Stewart have a gun?” a Harvard Law Review article once asked. Because of the “deadly consequences of giving guns back to individuals with disqualifying criminal convictions,” according to a recent statement by six leading congressional Democrats.
We at Cato have frequently challenged the legitimacy of universal felon disarmament. Federal law bans anyone who has ever been convicted of any crime punishable by more than a year in prison from ever having a firearm again. Even if their crime had nothing to do with violence, as is the case for Melynda Vincent, a Utah social worker who passed a bad check seventeen years ago. Even if they were not sentenced to prison time at all, like Bryan Range, who did three years on probation after understating his income in a 1995 food-stamps application. And even if they pick up someone else’s gun only in order to confront would-be home intruders, as Pittsburgher Diontai Moore learned.
Among the many problems with this one-size-fits-all regime: no other constitutional right evaporates for life as soon as someone is convicted of a felony. Even most violent criminals leave prison with their rights to speech, assembly, religion, and property intact. Once someone is off supervision, they ordinarily enjoy the full restoration of their protections against search and seizure. But for purposes of the Second Amendment, once a felon, forever a felon.
Another problem: in enacting the lifetime federal ban, Congress did not spell out what crimes would trigger permanent disarmament. It passed a law covering any crime punishable by more than one year in prison. That means future Congresses and state legislatures can annihilate constitutional rights just by passing new laws or harsher penalties (and what federal constitutional rights you have depends on the grace of your state legislature). There are some 300,000 federal regulatory crimes on the books. Felonies include cutting a fishing line, carrying a Samsung Galaxy Note 7 onto a plane without powering it off, and, in Michigan, committing adultery.
Is there any relief from this anti-Second Amendment carpet bomb? Some federal courts now entertain individual lawsuits, but the Supreme Court has yet to weigh in. In 1968, Congress greenlighted a program for the US attorney general to restore gun rights on a case-by-case basis, but it then blocked all funding for that purpose in 1992.
Attorney General Pam Bondi is trying to fix that by moving gun rights restoration directly within the Department of Justice. Will this noble effort work? Not if certain Democrats have their way. Representatives Rosa DeLauro, Jamie Raskin, and Grace Meng, together with Senators Patty Murray, Dick Durbin, and Chris Van Hollen, whined that Bondi’s move “violated the law, flouted the express intent of Congress, and undermined a prudent public safety measure.”
Madam Attorney General should show them the door. Permanently disarming every felon simply for being a felon is unconstitutional, and her modest move toward fixing this should be praised, not nipped in the bud—especially by a party that prides itself on criminal rehabilitation and proportionate punishment.