The Terrible Arguments for Keeping Non-Violent Felons Disarmed

Among the list of people prohibited from buying guns are convicted felons. In theory, this makes sense. Someone with a history of aggravated assault is someone who is likely to violate the law again. If you’re under the impression that you need to keep someone like that lawfully disarmed, then it makes sense to include them on that list.

The problem is that not all felons are created equal.

While some people have a long list of crimes, including violent offenses, there are those who also have a felony conviction because they wrote a bad check. There’s no issue with punishing someone for minor crimes–crimes are crimes, after all–they’re not in the same category as a serial killer by any stretch of the imagination.

Over at Reason, Jacob Sullum brings up two such examples, then gets into the reasoning given for trying to uphold the law keeping these two disarmed.

First, the examples:

After pleading guilty to bank fraud and filing a false income tax return in 2015, Selim Zherka was sentenced to 37 months in federal prison and three years of supervised release, plus fines, restitution, and forfeiture. Although he completed his sentence in May 2020, he is still subject to an additional penalty: He is not allowed to exercise the constitutional right to armed self-defense.

…

The crime need not be especially serious, let alone violent. While Zherka’s offenses involved millions of dollars, Utah social worker Melynda Vincent, who also is asking the Supreme Court to review her case, was convicted of bank fraud in 2008 because she wrote a bad check for $498 at a grocery store.

Although bank fraud can be punished by up to 30 years in prison under federal law, Vincent was sentenced to probation. But 17 years later, she still is not allowed to own a gun or even temporarily possess one.

And while some courts have found that the prohibition is unconstitutional, other courts have disagreed. One of those was the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.

That’s where I have a big problem with how they applied the Bruen decision’s history, text, and tradition standard.

In reaching that conclusion, the 2nd Circuit relied heavily on early laws that disarmed “religious minorities, political dissenters, Native Americans, and persons of color” because of “a perception that persons in those categories were inherently dangerous or non-law-abiding.” Those precedents, it said, showed “legislatures could disarm classes of people that they perceived as dangerous, without any judicial scrutiny of the empirical basis for that perception.”

Now, even if you think felons of all stripes should remain disarmed under the law, that so-called reasoning should be troubling to every American. Why? Because they’re justifying discrimination explicitly.

They’ve basically said that, sure, one could pass a law saying any group could be disarmed because it seems people from that group are inherently dangerous, and the Second Amendment wouldn’t be a valid defense. Statistically, young black men are arrested for homicide and other violent crimes more often than any other group, at least in relation to their percentage of the population, so the Second Circuit just basically said you could disarm black men, and it’s not a Second Amendment violation.

Sure, the law might be overturned on some other grounds, but let’s keep in mind that the history, text, and tradition standard was a guideline. It wasn’t all-encompassing. There’s no mention that a law must be held up as constitutional simply because a similar law existed at the time. If the law were bad law, courts can and should ignore it, as a law that was bad when applied to one group of people is far more likely to be wrong when applied to another.

But these are the kinds of arguments anti-gunners are going to rely on going forward, which is funny to me.

These are often the same people who tore down any statue they could find that had even a tangential relationship with something they could perceive as racist. They wanted all hints of racism purged from society…except for the gun control laws. Those not only remain, but are celebrated. They’re counted on, even if they might leave the door open for more racist regulations in the future.

Hypocrisy, thy name is gun control.

Editor’s Note: The Schumer Shutdown is here. Rather than put the American people first, Chuck Schumer and the radical Democrats forced a government shutdown for healthcare for illegals. They own this.

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