‘History Disarmed the Dangerous, Not the Peaceable’: SAF and NRA Urge Full Fifth Circuit to Limit Lifetime Gun Bans in United States v. Cordova

By Luke McCoy •

Key Takeaways

  • The Second Amendment Foundation and National Rifle Association filed an amicus brief on Oct. 21, 2026, in United States v. Cordova.
  • The brief urges the full Fifth Circuit to hold that only dangerous persons, not all felons, can be subject to lifetime federal firearms bans.
  • SAF argues colonial and Founding-era laws targeted dangerous individuals and often required nonviolent citizens, including those with prior convictions, to bear arms.
  • SAF rejects a Fifth Circuit metric that uses death-penalty eligibility for a Founding-era offense as justification for permanent disarmament.
  • The Fifth Circuit granted rehearing en banc and vacated the earlier three-judge panel opinion, meaning the full court will now decide the case.

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

BELLEVUE, WA — The Second Amendment Foundation and the National Rifle Association filed an amicus brief on Oct. 21, 2026, in United States v. Cordova, urging the Fifth Circuit to adopt a dangerousness standard for challenges to lifetime federal firearms bans, according to SAF’s announcement. An amicus brief is a friend-of-the-court filing from a group that is not a party to the case but wants the judges to weigh its argument. The NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action announced the filing the same day as a push for a test that ensures peaceable citizens cannot be disarmed.

In August I covered SAF Sued Over Lifetime Gun Bans for Non-Violent Felons. The Justice Department Just Built the Application Portal. That story was about the Justice Department’s new process letting people barred by criminal convictions apply to get their federal gun rights back. As I reported then, applicants carry the burden of convincing the Attorney General they are not a danger. Cordova is the other front. It asks whether the Constitution allows a lifetime ban on people who are not dangerous in the first place.

The case is back before the Fifth Circuit after the court granted rehearing en banc and vacated the panel opinion, according to SAF. In plain terms, the court wiped out the decision a three-judge panel had issued and agreed to rehear the case before the full court.

According to SAF, the brief 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. SAF says colonial and Founding-era restrictions targeted the dangerous. It points to militia laws that required able-bodied men to keep arms and contained no exemption for prior nonviolent convictions. It also cites some statutes that expressly protected criminals’ arms from seizure. If that reading of the history holds up, it is hard to square with a rule that disarms a peaceable person for life.

“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.”

SAF says the brief also rejects a metric adopted in an earlier Fifth Circuit decision. That metric treats a lifetime ban as justified whenever the predicate offense, meaning the crime behind the conviction, was a felony punishable by death at the Founding. SAF’s answer has three parts:

  • Many Founding-era felonies were not capital crimes.
  • People who completed their sentences were not left disarmed. They were often required to bear arms under the militia acts.
  • Using death-penalty eligibility as a stand-in for permanent disarmament would make the Second Amendment a second-class right, because 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.”

The brief and the vacated panel opinion were not available for this article. The account of both rests on SAF’s description, and SAF is one of the two groups that filed the brief. The full Fifth Circuit has not ruled.

More from USA Carry:

The two tracks work very differently. The Justice Department’s program is an application that the government reviews one person at a time. A ruling that dangerousness is the constitutional standard would set a floor the government cannot go below. A responsible carry mindset includes knowing exactly who the law treats as prohibited and why. Cordova could redraw that line for every state in the Fifth Circuit.

I will continue tracking United States v. Cordova as the full Fifth Circuit takes it up.

Read the original story: ‘History Disarmed the Dangerous, Not the Peaceable’: SAF and NRA Urge Full Fifth Circuit to Limit Lifetime Gun Bans in United States v. Cordova

Related Topics:
firearm firearms federal ‘history disarmed dangerous peaceable’