May 23, 2024 - Epoch Times
10:09
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| The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has just ruled that banning all felons from being able to own guns is actually unconstitutional. | |
| This ruling now flings the door wide open for potentially upwards of 20 million people to try and restore their right to keep and bear arms. | |
| Although, it is worth mentioning that there is a lot of nuance to this particular story, so let's go through it together. | |
| To start with, one of the quirks of the American judicial system is that sometimes the rights enumerated in the U.S. | |
| Constitution are seen as inviolable, sacred rights that are afforded to all U.S. | |
| citizens. | |
| However, at other times, those same rights are treated more as privileges, things that the government can take away from you if, according to them, you don't behave properly. | |
| I mean, at the very extreme end, the government can take your life if you commit a capital offense or if you try to move your family to a cabin over in Idaho. | |
| However, getting back to the topic of today's discussion, the Second Amendment to the U.S. | |
| Constitution says, and I quote, That is very straightforward. | |
| However, for anyone convicted of a felony, or for anyone sentenced to over a year in prison, they've actually been stripped away of their Second Amendment privileges, regardless of whether the crime they committed was violent or non-violent. | |
| Which brings us neatly along to the case of Mr. Stephen Duarte. | |
| You see, Mr. Duarte was previously a convicted criminal having five prior non-violent criminal convictions on his record, with each one of those being punishable by over a year in prison. | |
| The crimes included things like vandalism, possession of a controlled substance, evading police, and so on. | |
| And Mr. Duarte had already served out his prison time. | |
| But the fact that his crimes were non-violent doesn't really matter, because according to the letter of the law, specifically, according to the Federal Felon in Possession Law, a person cannot possess a firearm if they were previously convicted of a quote, crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year. | |
| Mr. Duarte was convicted for longer than a year, and therefore, he was not allowed to own a gun. | |
| However, you fast forward to March of 2020, and Mr. Duarte was sitting in the back of a car that happened to run a stop sign. | |
| The cops saw the car, they turned their sirens on, and began to try to get the car to pull over. | |
| During this interim period, Mr. Duarte was seen tossing a gun out of his window. | |
| He, of course, wasn't allowed to own a handgun, and therefore, after several months, a jury sentenced him to over four years in prison. | |
| But Mr. Duarte appealed that decision to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, who just earlier this month ruled in his favor. | |
| Quote, In a decision that could have a major impact on the exercise of Second Amendment rights, a split 9th Circuit panel has ruled that convicted felons can own guns, at least when it comes to nonviolent offenders who have re-entered society. | |
| In a two-to-one decision handed down on May 9th, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Mr. Duarte's conviction violated the Second Amendment as applied to him. | |
| Specifically, the court's majority found that the federal government failed to prove that its Felon in Possession Law supports disarming convicted felons for life under a two-step framework established by the U.S. | |
| Supreme Court in the 2022 New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruin case. | |
| Now, just to pause here for a quick moment, and without getting into too much of the weeds, the U.S. | |
| Supreme Court case that's referenced here, the Bruin case, it really upended a lot of gun restrictions here in America. | |
| Essentially, what the Bruin decision did is that it set up a new test that courts across America have to apply when deciding whether or not a certain anti-gun law violates the U.S. | |
| Constitution. | |
| Here is the relevant part in the majority opinion of the Bruin case, And the majority opinion for your reference was written by Justice Clarence Thomas. | |
| Quote, "The burden falls on the defendants to show that New York's proper cause requirement is consistent with this nation's historical tradition of firearm regulation. | |
| Constitutional rights are enshrined with the scope they were understood to have when the people adopted them. | |
| With these principles in mind, the court concludes that respondents have failed to meet their burden to identify an American tradition justifying New York's proper cause requirement." And so, with that, starting in the year 2022, the U.S. | |
| Supreme Court established this new legal precedent. | |
| It's basically a two-step process to determine whether a given law violates the Second Amendment. | |
| Firstly, the court must determine whether the Second Amendment plain text covers the conduct in a given case, and then secondly, whether or not the anti-gun law is consistent with this nation's historical tradition of firearm regulation. | |
| It's exactly this two-step process that was used in the case with Mr. Stephen Duarte. | |
| In regards to the first question, whether the plain text of the Second Amendment covered his individual conduct, well, here is what the majority opinion of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals wrote. | |
| Quote, And so, having established that Stephen was a person covered under the Second Amendment, it became now the government's job to prove that their law was consistent with this nation's historical tradition of firearm regulation. | |
| And so, the government attempted to do this in a unique way. | |
| Quote, the government had argued that 18th century felons had no right to possess a firearm because they faced execution and total estate forfeiture for their crimes. | |
| However, when asked to provide specific examples of the types of felonies on Mr. Duarte's record, the government was not able to provide any, leading the Ninth Circuit to not buy the argument and instead to write this in their majority opinion. | |
| Quote, Based on this record, we cannot say that Duarte's predicate offenses were, by founding era standards, of a nature serious enough to justify permanently depriving him of his fundamental Second Amendment rights. | |
| The Second Amendment's plain text, and historically understood meaning, therefore, presumptively graduate his individual right to possess a firearm for self-defense. | |
| Meaning, as a practical matter, that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a blanket application of the Felon in Possession Law is unconstitutional, and that each person's situation must be looked at on a case-by-case basis. | |
| Now it is worth mentioning that this is not the first appeals court to make this sort of a ruling. | |
| In fact, last year, the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals, they made a similar determination in a Pennsylvania case as well. | |
| But the significance of this ruling out of California is several fold. | |
| For one, it came out of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which is by far known to be the most liberal in the entire justice system. | |
| Secondly, the 9th Circuit, it covers the western states as well as Hawaii and Alaska, which together represent about 80 million people. | |
| And, given that 8% of the U.S. | |
| are felons, and then furthermore, many more people have been convicted of misdemeanors that carry at least a year in prison, well, this new ruling from the 9th Circuit, it opens the door to quite literally millions of potential new legal gun owners. | |
| Although eventually, either this case or a case like it will likely reach the U.S. | |
| Supreme Court so that a blanket rule can be made across the entirety of the U.S. | |
| In fact, that was the sentiment shared by one of the dissenting judges in the 9th Circuit who wrote the following in a dissenting opinion. | |
| And so, that is where the situation currently stands. | |
| sooner rather than later, the U.S. Supreme Court will address the constitutionality of the federal felon firearm ban, or otherwise provide clearer guidance on whether felons are protected by the Second Amendment. | |
| And so that is where the situation currently stands. | |
| As a practical matter, moving forward, if you happen to live in a state covered by either the Ninth or the Third Circuit Court Do you think this is a good development? | |
| happen to have served at least a year in prison before, well, you might now once again be eligible to own a firearm. | |
| If you'd like to read the full decision from the Ninth Circuit for yourself, I'll throw a link to the PDF version of it down in the description box below. | |
| And actually, I'd love to know your thoughts. | |
| Do you think that this is a good development? | |
| I mean, very famously, Justice Sam Alito a few years ago, he wrote in a separate case that, quote, "The federal statute barring felons from possessing firearms probably does more to combat gun violence than any other federal law." Do you agree? | |
| And if you do, do you agree that a blanket ban is the way to go? | |
| Is that a good idea? | |
| Or should there be more of a distinction between violent or non-violent offenders? | |
| Or perhaps a third option, are you a Second Amendment absolutist and do you believe that shall not infringe is as clear as day, regardless of your previous conviction history? | |
| I'd love to know your thoughts. | |
| Please leave them in the comments section below. | |
| I'll be reading through them later tonight as well as throughout the rest of the week. | |
| And also, as you're making your way down there to the comments section, we'll perhaps take a short detour to smash those like and subscribe buttons so that the YouTube algorithm will be quite literally forced to share this information out to ever more people. | |
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| And then, until next time, I'm your host, Roman from The Epoch Times. |
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