One Old Misdemeanor, a Lifetime Gun Ban, and the Iowa Ruling That Just Ended It

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DES MOINES, IA — The Iowa Supreme Court has thrown out a felony conviction built on a lifetime firearm ban, ruling that the indefinite prohibition could not survive the strict scrutiny that Iowa voters wrote into the state constitution in 2022.

In a 5-2 decision filed June 26, the court reversed Eric Martin Schadl’s conviction under Iowa Code section 724.26(2)(a) and ordered the case dismissed. The statute makes it a class “D” felony for anyone convicted of a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence to possess a firearm, with no expiration date.

Schadl’s predicate conviction was a 2010 misdemeanor domestic abuse assault. He went fourteen years without reoffending. In July 2024, after a report that he had firearms in his home, he admitted to owning a .22 caliber rifle and acknowledged the old conviction. He entered a conditional guilty plea, drew a suspended five-year sentence and a $1,025 fine, and appealed.

The win rests on Amendment 1A, the provision Iowans ratified in 2022 declaring the right to keep and bear arms a fundamental individual right. Its key command is short. “Any and all restrictions of this right shall be subject to strict scrutiny.”

That standard mattered, because it decides who carries the burden. Writing for the majority, Justice McDermott held that under strict scrutiny the State, not the defendant, must prove a firearm restriction is narrowly tailored to a compelling interest and uses the least restrictive means. The court refused to apply a watered-down version of the test, warning that diluting strict scrutiny in one area weakens it everywhere.

The State conceded a compelling interest in public safety. Where it failed was tailoring. In the district court, the State responded to Schadl’s motion to dismiss with a single page and never even named strict scrutiny as the governing standard. On appeal it tried to fill the gap with social science papers on domestic-abuser recidivism that no expert had vouched for and the trial court never saw.

The court was not persuaded. It noted research showing recidivism risk for domestic abusers drops sharply over time, with a notable decline near the fifteen-year mark. Against a man fourteen years removed from a single misdemeanor, with no evidence he remained a danger, the majority found the indefinite ban “seriously overinclusive” and not narrowly tailored.

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The court also pointed to less restrictive options the legislature could have chosen, including a fixed prohibition period or a restoration process like the one Iowa already offers for people disqualified on mental-health grounds.

The State’s fallback argument, that a discretionary pardon from the governor could restore Schadl’s rights, got no traction. The majority called the pardon power completely discretionary and inadequate as a substitute for the narrow tailoring strict scrutiny demands.

The ruling is narrow in an important way. The majority upheld the statute on its face, meaning the law itself stands. It fell only as applied to Schadl, on the specific record the State built, or failed to build. Going forward, prosecutors defending the indefinite ban will have to prove narrow tailoring case by case rather than lean on the bare fact of an old conviction.

Justices McDonald and Oxley dissented. They argued that the scope of the right, as understood when voters approved Amendment 1A in 2022, never extended to convicted domestic abusers, and that long-standing firearm laws already on the books should not be picked apart one defendant at a time.

In a concurrence, Justice Mansfield urged the legislature to create a clear path for restoring firearm rights after a conviction, which would let the State avoid the kind of satellite litigation this case produced.

I’ll be tracking whether Iowa lawmakers respond with a restoration statute, and how prosecutors adjust their approach to section 724.26(2)(a) in the wake of this decision.

Read the original story: One Old Misdemeanor, a Lifetime Gun Ban, and the Iowa Ruling That Just Ended It