The Justice Department is proceeding with plans to revive a moribund relief process for people who have lost their Second Amendment rights as a result of criminal convictions. The department’s FY 2026 budget proposal, published earlier this month, includes funds for a Firearm Rights Restoration Initiative within the Office of the Pardon Attorney.
That is good news for Second Amendment advocates because it promises to ameliorate the injustices caused by an illogical, constitutionally dubious law that deprives people of the right to armed self-defense even when they pose no plausible threat to public safety. It is also good news for criminal justice reformers because it addresses a lifelong penalty that irrationally punishes nonviolent offenders long after they have served their formal sentences. But because this particular penalty involves guns, Democrats who usually worry about excessively harsh criminal punishment are warning that any attempt to apply the disability more judiciously will endanger the public.
Sen. Richard Durbin (D–Ill.), for example, has proudly supported criminal justice reforms such as the Fair Sentencing Act, the FIRST STEP Act, and the elimination of the penal disparity between crack and cocaine powder. Yet Durbin, who chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee during the Biden administration and is now its ranking member, recently joined five other Democratic legislators in complaining that Attorney General Pam Bondi wants to “help violent criminals regain firearms,” which Durbin et al. say defies a congressional spending rider first enacted in 1992.
That rider effectively nullified 18 USC 925(c), which allows people to seek restoration of their gun rights by applying to the attorney general for relief. The attorney general has the discretion to grant relief based on a determination that “the circumstances regarding the disability, and the applicant’s record and reputation, are such that the applicant will not be likely to act in a manner dangerous to public safety and that the granting of the relief would not be contrary to the public interest.” But that function historically has been delegated to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), and the rider that Durbin is defending bars that agency from using any part of its budget to consider applications under Section 925(c).
Bondi, who says she is acting in response to President Donald Trump’s February 6 executive order “Protecting Second Amendment Rights,” thinks she has found a way around that restriction. In an interim final rule that took effect in March, she rescinded the ATF’s authority over Section 925(c) applications, which she says will now be handled by the Office of the Pardon Attorney. Durbin and his colleagues say that rule is “unlawful and counter to the expressed intent” of Congress.
“Given the pervasiveness of gun violence in our nation, this Administration should not be circumventing Congress’s authority to prioritize restoring firearm privileges to individuals convicted of serious or violent crimes,” the Democratic lawmakers said in a June 18 letter to Bondi. “Our country is plagued by an epidemic of gun violence….In order to effectively recover from this epidemic, Congress intended that those most likely to commit crimes—particularly those with prior convictions—do not regain access to firearms.”
Several things are notable about that complaint. First, the lawmakers describe constitutionally guaranteed rights as mere “privileges,” implying that the government can grant or withhold them at will. Second, Durbin’s insistence that criminal convictions should result in the permanent loss of those rights contradicts his usual emphasis on proportionality and rehabilitation. Third, Durbin glides over the sweeping reach of the federal law that disarms people based on criminal convictions, which applies to millions of Americans with no history of violence.
That law, 18 USC 922(g)(1), prohibits gun possession by anyone who has been convicted of a crime punishable by more than a year of incarceration. It does not matter whether the crime involved violence (or even a victim), how long ago it was committed, or what sentence was actually imposed. Contrary to Durbin’s implication, the offenses that trigger this disability cover a wide range, including many that have no plausible connection to the “epidemic of gun violence.”
Bryan Range, for example, lost his Second Amendment rights because he understated his income when he applied for food stamps. Although that was a misdemeanor under Pennsylvania law and Range’s sentence was limited to probation and restitution, the offense was notionally punishable by up to five years in prison, which was enough to trigger Section 922(g)(1). That application of the law, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit concluded in 2023, was inconsistent with the Second Amendment.
Based on similar reasoning, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit last year overturned the Section 922(g)(1) conviction of Steven Duarte, a California man who had lost his gun rights because of a nonviolent criminal record. The 5th Circuit and the 6th Circuit likewise have allowed as-applied challenges to the law, although they rejected them in those particular cases.
If you do not have the resources to seek restoration of your gun rights through litigation, what alternatives are available? You could try to obtain a pardon, which is iffy and difficult at the state or federal level.
Section 925(c) was supposed to provide another option. But Durbin apparently thinks that was a mistake. In his view, no one who loses his Second Amendment rights under Section 922(g)(1) should be able to get them back by making the case that he is not “likely to act in a manner dangerous to public safety.” People covered by that law, he implies, are by definition guilty of “serious or violent crimes” that demonstrate they can never be trusted with firearms.
That would be news to Melynda Vincent, a Utah social worker who was convicted of bank fraud in 2008 because she paid for groceries with a bad check for $498. Seventeen years later, Vincent is still not allowed to own a gun or even temporarily possess one, even though she has long been law-abiding and productive. Durbin wants us to believe that disability is essential to protecting the public from gun violence.
“Many felonies are not violent in the least, raising no particular suspicion that the convict is a threat to public safety,” notes UCLA law professor Adam Winkler. “Perjury, securities law violations, embezzlement, obstruction of justice, and a host of other felonies do not indicate a propensity for dangerousness.”
Vincent’s lawyers, who are asking the Supreme Court to resolve the question of whether the Second Amendment allows the government to disarm people based on nothing more than a nonviolent criminal conviction, add some more examples. They note that “adultery is a felony punishable by five years’ imprisonment” in Michigan, that “repeatedly sharing streaming websites’ passwords is a felony” in Tennessee, that “using a telephone to make a single anonymous call to annoy or embarrass” and “temporarily using someone else’s car without their consent” are both punishable by more than a year of imprisonment in Maryland, and that “‘recklessly…[d]efacing’ a school building—something countless teenaged pranksters have done—is a felony” in Arizona. They add that federal law also “includes many felonies that involve no danger,” such as “knowingly and unlawfully ‘export[ing] any fish or wildlife'” and making “an unauthorized recording of a movie” in a theater.
As Durbin sees it, these are all “serious or violent crimes” that rightly result in the permanent loss of the right to arms. Gun control groups paint a similar picture.
Everytown for Gun Safety warns that reviving Section 925(c) “inevitably risks putting guns back in dangerous hands.” Josh Sugarmann, executive director of the Violence Policy Center, says Bondi’s plan is “deeply disturbing and obviously dangerous” because it would invite “applications from millions of convicted felons through an ‘easy to use’ web portal.”
Margaret Love, who served as pardon attorney during the Clinton administration and is now a lawyer specializing in clemency, offers a different perspective. “Loss of firearm rights can be the most significant and enduring result of a criminal conviction for many Americans,” she and Beth Johnson note in a recent report from the Collateral Consequences Resource Center (CCRC), which Love co-founded in 2014. “Like many other collateral consequences that reinforce a convicted person’s second-class status, felony dispossession laws are frequently overbroad and have no clear public safety nexus.”
Love and Johnson allude to the anti-gun bias that explains why Democrats who usually worry about the long-lasting collateral consequences of a criminal conviction do not view the loss of Second Amendment rights in the same light. “Perhaps because gun violence is such a volatile political issue,” the CCRC says, “there appears to be no national constituency that supports allowing any ‘convicted felons’ to regain their firearm rights. Lost in the debate is what should be common ground: treating people fairly and supporting their reintegration includes restoring, with appropriate safeguards, their full access to housing, jobs, credit, and yes, also firearm rights.”
