Gun Rights Groups Ask Supreme Court to End Lifetime Gun Bans for Nonviolent Felons
Joseph Frederick Johnson has never been convicted of a violent offense. According to Firearms Policy Coalition, his sole predicate conviction is a 2015 state marijuana-cultivation offense. Yet federal law permanently bars him from possessing firearms or ammunition.
Now the National Rifle Association, Firearms Policy Coalition, and Second Amendment Foundation are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to hear his challenge, and confront whether a nonviolent conviction can justify stripping a peaceable American of his Second Amendment rights for life.
The organizations filed an amicus brief dated October 1 in Johnson v. United States, No. 26-270. Their argument goes directly to the Constitution’s original meaning: America’s historical tradition supports disarming dangerous people, they contend, but does not support permanently disarming peaceable people simply because an offense carries a felony label.
A Nonviolent Conviction Becomes a Lifetime Gun Prohibition
Johnson’s case challenges the application of 18 U.S.C. §922(g)(1), the federal prohibition commonly called the felon-in-possession law.
According to FPC’s announcement, the Tenth Circuit rejected Johnson’s Second Amendment challenge because its precedent categorically bars as-applied challenges to that prohibition, even when the underlying offense was nonviolent.
An as-applied challenge asks whether a law is constitutional when enforced against a particular person. Johnson is seeking that individual constitutional review. The organizations argue that courts cannot shut the door on such challenges by treating every felony conviction as sufficient grounds for permanent disarmament.
“The government does not get to turn a decade-old marijuana conviction into a lifetime ban on exercising a constitutionally protected right. We have been fighting this immoral disarmament scheme for years—in our research, scholarship, and cases across the country. FPC and our Grassroots Army will continue to Fight Forward until we end this unconstitutional and immoral lifetime gun ban,” FPC President Brandon Combs said in a release.
That is the civil-rights question at the center of this case. The Second Amendment protects a fundamental right. The government should have to justify taking it away rather than relying on a criminal classification as the entire constitutional argument.
“Presumptively Lawful” Does Not End the Inquiry
The brief addresses language gun owners have encountered repeatedly since District of Columbia v. Heller: the Court’s description of longstanding felon-possession prohibitions as “presumptively lawful.”
NRA, FPC, and SAF argue that the Tenth Circuit has effectively converted that presumption into a conclusive rule, preventing people like Johnson from challenging the prohibition’s application to them.
Their position is that New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen requires the government to demonstrate that firearm restrictions fit the Nation’s historical tradition. A reference to a presumptively lawful restriction, they argue, does not eliminate that requirement.
“Heller’s ‘presumptively lawful’ line was never a blank check for a lifetime ban on every peaceable American with a felony on his record,” SAF Director of Legal Research and Education Kostas Moros said in a press release. “Historically, we disarmed dangerous people. We did not strip the Second Amendment right from those who broke the law without violence and then went back to living as ordinary, peaceable citizens. A permanent ban with no path to restoration is simply not how our tradition worked.”
The organizations ask the Supreme Court to clarify that the historical justification for felon-disarmament laws is the tradition of disarming dangerous people. They contend that justification does not extend to permanently disarming peaceable nonviolent offenders.
The Founding-Era Evidence: Offenders Still Had Arms
The brief’s most consequential historical argument concerns what happened after people completed their criminal sentences.
According to the organizations, colonial and Founding-era militia laws did not exempt eligible men from service because of prior incarceration or crimes committed. Those men remained subject to requirements to keep and bear arms.
That evidence challenges the premise that a criminal conviction automatically placed someone outside the armed citizenry forever.
The brief also identifies a 1786 Massachusetts law governing estate sales to recover money stolen by corrupt tax collectors and sheriffs. Arms were protected from those sales. It cites additional laws protecting arms from collection for debts and taxes, including the federal Uniform Militia Act of 1792.
The organizations offer these laws as evidence that wrongdoing did not automatically extinguish a person’s ability to possess arms.
Another example involves Shays’s Rebellion. Massachusetts initially conditioned pardons for participants on surrendering their arms and waiting three years to reclaim them. According to the brief, they were ultimately permitted to reclaim their arms within four months.
Even that episode involving armed rebellion, the organizations’ historical account shows, did not produce the permanent disarmament Johnson faces over a nonviolent conviction.
Peaceable Americans Have Second Amendment Rights
The brief distinguishes being peaceable from having never broken a law. A person can commit a nonviolent crime without demonstrating a propensity for violence, the organizations argue.
Their historical survey also examines discriminatory colonial laws and wartime disarmament of loyalists. The brief rejects discriminatory laws as valid constitutional analogues and cautions that desperate wartime measures were not models for constitutional rights in peacetime.
The filing asks the Supreme Court to grant review. It is an argument for hearing and deciding Johnson’s challenge, rather than a ruling restoring his rights.
For gun owners, the stakes reach beyond one marijuana conviction. Allowing the government to permanently extinguish Second Amendment rights through a felony label gives that label enormous power over a fundamental liberty.
The Supreme Court should hear Johnson’s case and require the government to defend that power against the Constitution and the historical record. A peaceable American’s right to keep and bear arms deserves a constitutional examination—not automatic rejection.
About Duncan Johnson:
Duncan Johnson is a lifelong firearms enthusiast and unwavering defender of the Second Amendment—where “shall not be infringed” means exactly what it says. A graduate of George Mason University, he enjoys competing in local USPSA and multi-gun competitions whenever he’s not covering the latest in gun rights and firearm policy. Duncan is a regular contributor and editor-in-chief for AmmoLand News and is responsible for AmmoLand’s daily gun-rights reporting and industry coverage.