SAF and the National Rifle Association have filed an amicus brief in United States v. Cordova, urging the Fifth Circuit to adopt a dangerousness standard to challenges of lifetime federal firearms bans.
The case returns to the Fifth Circuit after the court granted rehearing en banc and vacated the panel opinion. The brief filed today urges the court to hold that historical tradition supports disarming only dangerous persons – those with a proven proclivity for violence or who pose a threat to the government – not every person convicted of a felony. Colonial and Founding-era restrictions targeted the dangerous. Militia laws required able-bodied men to keep arms and contained no exemption for prior nonviolent convictions, and some statutes even expressly protected criminals’ arms from seizure.
“History disarmed the dangerous, not the peaceable,” said SAF Director of Legal Research and Education Kostas Moros. “A nonviolent felony is not a lifetime forfeiture of the right to keep and bear arms.”
The brief also rejects the metric, adopted in an earlier Fifth Circuit decision, that treats a lifetime ban as justified whenever the predicate offense was a felony punishable by death at the Founding. Many Founding-era felonies were not capital. Those who completed their sentences were not left disarmed – they were often required to bear arms under the militia acts. Using historical eligibility for the death penalty as a proxy for permanent disarmament would treat the Second Amendment as a second-class right, since no other Bill of Rights guarantee is forfeited on that basis.
“There is no tradition of permanently stripping the right to keep and bear arms from peaceable citizens, including nonviolent felons who completed their sentences,” said SAF Executive Director Adam Kraut. “The Fifth Circuit should make clear that dangerousness, not the mere existence of a felony conviction, is the standard. Peaceable Americans who have paid their debt to society should not be forced to surrender their right to keep and bear arms for the remainder of their lives.”
Read about it here: saf.org/saf-nra-file-amicus-…
The basis for states passing broad "sensitive places" laws (also known as "gun free zones") is that supposedly, having armed citizens in such places is fundamentally dangerous.
That belief is not based on reality. As our new factsheet shows, state-level government data proves that Americans with carry permits are overwhelmingly law abiding, committing crimes at a rate many times lower than the general population.
As some of the examples we highlight demonstrate, they have also occasionally been called upon to save lives in horrifying situations, and they rose to the occasion to do just that. Laws that focus on disarming such law-abiding individuals are fundamentally misguided and should be repealed.
As we also argue in several of our active cases on this topic, if the government wants to declare a place "sensitive" and off-limits for legal carry, it should be expected to provide comprehensive security at such locations.
Like all our factsheets in this new series, we include extensive sources in the document. Check it out here: drive.google.com/file/d/1qTQ…
SAF retweeted
Thread done on both briefs here. It's long, enjoy.
One last thing to note. Cook County argues repeatedly that AR15s are bad for self-defense, and pistols are better for that purpose.
Chicago argued exactly the OPPOSITE in defending its handgun ban in McDonald (another SAF case!). From their briefing in that case:
