National Review
Why are lifetime gun prohibitions being imposed on tax fraud?
That punishment must be suitable for crime is a widespread axiom. If you lie about an income tax return, you can expect it to face certain consequences, such as fines and late tax refunds, probably with interest and perhaps even confinement at home or (in the extreme case) jail time. But you would not expect a lifetime restriction on your fundamental rights – such as the freedom to speak, own property or enjoy your privacy. Such punishments would be arbitrary and unfair, given the nature of the crime. Nor would you expect to permanently lose your right to own a firearm as punishment for a false statement to the IRS. But this is exactly what could happen, and what has happened, because of an implacable and unconstitutional federal law – passed as part of the Arms Control Act of 1968 – that automatically prohibits almost all criminals, even those convicted only for crimes. non-violent, to have firearms for self-defense. The loss of the natural and constitutionally protected right to own a firearm is an unjust and arbitrary consequence for a non-violent crime of this nature. It is the same as losing the right to speak or the right against irrational search and seizure. And yet, unlike these other – hypothetical – unjust punishments, this lifetime ban on firearms is actually imposed by the federal government on tens of thousands – if not hundreds of thousands – of nonviolent offenders. Nonviolent criminals are not the only people subject to this “life sentence”. The conviction of any crime punishable by more than one year in prison automatically triggers the ban. And that lifelong prohibition applies regardless of whether any imprisonment has actually been served. Under this comprehensive standard, even some misdemeanors result in the loss of arms rights for life. Worse, it all depends – arbitrarily – on where the offense was committed. There are eight states in which a single DUI conviction triggers this permanent gun ban. In Oklahoma, adultery (which is not even a crime in some jurisdictions and is just a misdemeanor in others) will trigger this lifetime ban. In Pennsylvania, a conviction for reading someone’s e-mail without permission would result in a lifetime without a weapon. The same would happen with the federal crime of uttering “any obscene, indecent or profane language through radio communication”. The Mountain States Legal Foundation’s Center to Keep and Bear Arms recently filed three amicus curiae petitions (or a friend of the court) with the U.S. Supreme Court dealing with this matter. One in the name of Ken Flick, who lost his rights to the gun for the rest of his life because of a 1987 conviction for importing and reselling pirated cassette tapes. Another in the name of Lisa Folajtar, who was convicted of making false statements in her tax returns in 2011 and has since had no more weapons. And the last, joining the Cato Institute on behalf of Raymond Holloway, who pleaded guilty to a DUI misdemeanor in 2005, in which no one was injured, and has since been denied his natural right to self-defense. The lifetime ban on firearms for non-violent offenders is contrary to the natural rights protected by the United States Constitution. This violates the Second Amendment. And it goes against the Supreme Court precedent. Some lower courts have maintained this permanent ban through the new – and incorrect – notion that the right to own firearms requires “virtuosity” and can be withdrawn by the government from “serious” offenders. Other fundamental rights, such as those protected by the First and Fourth Amendments, are not treated in this way. The Supreme Court has already paved the way to end these unfair prohibitions for life; he simply needs to apply his own test. The District Court of Columbia v. Heller makes it clear that courts should look at the Second Amendment’s text, history and tradition when determining whether modern firearms regulations are constitutional. The text of the Amendment speaks of an individual right to own arms: a right based on human nature, not a governmental determination of “virtue”. And based on the same standard of natural law, our Anglo-American tradition only limits the exercise of that right by those who are proven to be dangerous. In an adequate and historically informed understanding, “dangerousness” is a category closely adapted with a clear justification, in contrast to the abstract and unduly harsh idea that any crime that a court or legislature considers “serious” must mean the end of human rights. a person’s weapon. The difference in standards and reasoning is not small. There is a basic conflict of views as to the very nature of our rights. Firearms rights are not a privilege granted by the government to the “virtuous”, to be denied on any basis that the government considers “serious”. This misunderstanding about gun rights shows a deep and dangerous misunderstanding about rights in general and where they come from. The ban on non-violent life-long firearms should not be maintained on the basis of such errors. Based on sound reasoning and the Supreme Court decision at Heller, nonviolent individuals cannot be uniformly prevented from exercising their natural and fundamental right to keep and bear arms for the rest of their lives.