In a significant step forward for gun rights, the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last Wednesday in Williams v. Blanche that stripping Second Amendment protections from a nonviolent offender for life is unconstitutional.
The defendant’s offense was serious, to be sure, but there is no other enumerated right subject to such treatment when a crime did not result in harm to others.
Defendant paid for his nonviolent crime, but the gun ban remained
Edward Williams of Pennsylvania was convicted of DUI in 2005 and faced up to five years in prison due to an earlier drunk driving offense. That’s certainly not how an upstanding citizen conducts themselves.
But the guilty party served his sentence in home confinement and went on to change his ways. The potential incarceration he faced, however, meant that he was hit with a lifetime federal gun ban, a punishment for a nonviolent offender that was ripe for challenge.
That came from the Firearms Policy Coalition (FPC), which received a favorable district court ruling in 2023. After the appeals court upheld that decision last week, organization President Brandon Combs praised his group’s successful effort to right this wrong.
“FPC has spent years building the historical record, litigating these cases, and briefing courts across the country to establish the correct rule: The government does not get to turn a nonviolent conviction into a lifetime ban on exercising a constitutionally protected right,” Combs declared. “Our strategy is paying off again.”
No precedent exists for stripping 2A rights from nonviolent offenders for life
Judge Paul Matey wrote for the court. He noted that the Department of Justice never demonstrated that Williams “threatens to ‘misuse a gun while intoxicated,’ or that he ‘poses a danger to himself or others as a result’ of alcohol abuse.”
Authorities arrested drunkards since before the Founding Era, but these infractions did not carry with them a sweeping ban on a constitutional freedom.
Williams lived clean for more than two decades, and such punishment does not come close to aligning with the nation’s historical tradition of gun control and disarming dangerous individuals.
The court got it right. Again.
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