Is There a Risk Restoring Gun Rights to Convicted Felons?

I’m glad to see felons have a chance to get their gun rights restored. On November 4, the DOJ will accept the first 5,000 applications from the general public, and I expect those slots will fill pretty quickly, assuming there will be slots or something. We still don’t know. What we do know is that it’s been nearly 35 years since felons could get their rights back at the federal level.

And not everyone is thrilled by this direction. 

In fact, as we’re looking at what’s going on here, we need to remember how the gun rights restoration process got throttled in the first place and what people are saying about the risk.

A 1992 Violence Policy Center report helped spell the end of the ATF program.

In it, the group, which supports gun control and opposes the revival of this program, analyzed cases of convicted felons whose gun rights were restored.

It found that out of the more than 2,000 people who had their gun rights restored between 1985 and 1992, 69 were subsequently rearrested. Their crimes included attempted murder, first degree sexual assault, kidnapping, child molestation and other serious convictions.

Following the VPC’s report, Congress blocked the ATF from using federal funds to process individual gun rights restorations, effectively ending that program.

Now, it should be noted that “rearrested” and “reconvicted” aren’t the same thing, and a quick scan of the examples provided in that so-called study makes it pretty clear that they don’t know what happened to a lot of those felons with restored gun rights. At least some are shown to have not been convicted of anything.

And yes, some were.

However, that’s a serious methodological issue with this report, which is par for the course with the Violence Policy Center, based on my experience.

Now that we’ve talked about the past, let’s talk about the future.

Kristen Rand, government affairs director with the Violence Policy Center, says the DOJ’s new version of the program is “obviously dangerous” and that “this taxpayer-funded guns-for-felons program should be permanently shut down.”

But experts who study and work on clemency — which includes pardons and commutations — welcome the DOJ program, saying it gives people who paid their debt to society a second chance and restoring some rights is worthwhile.

If the application review process is as involved as the DOJ says it is, then the risk of a pardoned individual going on to commit a violent offense should be low, says Rachel Barkow, a law professor at New York University. Generally, she says, of the people who have received state or federal pardons for past crimes, “the recidivism rate is very low.”

The phrase “taxpayer-funded guns-for-felons program” isn’t even a misnomer. It’s a deliberate attempt to frame what’s happening as somehow intentionally arming dangerous people. It seems to suggest that the taxpayers are buying guns for these people, when that’s not happening at all.

Further, as noted above, the Violence Policy Center isn’t exactly an unbiased watchdog simply seeking the truth. They’re a gun control organization that wants restrictions on guns. That means their actual bias needs to be taken into account.

Barkow, on the other hand, is a law professor. She has her own biases, sure, but since I’ve never run into her before, I’m going to guess it’s not because she’s such a rabid Second Amendment supporter. 

And the recidivism rate is actually pretty low. Guns are easy enough for a felon to get as it is, so for these people to not have a gun already means walking the straight and narrow is a choice they’ve made.

Give them their rights back. They deserve them.

Not because they did everything right for a long enough period of time, but because they’re humans.

Editor’s Note: President Trump and Republicans across the country are doing everything they can to protect our Second Amendment rights and right to self-defense.

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