People make mistakes. I've made more than a few. I've made more than a few this week, including at least one that was kind of public and kind of big. We're all human, and some of those mistakes other people make were even bigger than my screw-up. They got arrested, convicted, and sentenced.
Since then, they've been clean, and they deserve their rights back. More than that, we need them to get their rights back.
This isn't really about politics, though I suspect that it wouldn't hurt to build up the pro-gun base. It's about something more.
First, let's talk about some who have gotten their rights back.
The Trump administration quietly restored the gun rights to 22 people who had lost them because of felonies, indictments or other convictions this year as it prepares to revive a long-dormant program that's expected to draw a tsunami of applications.
Department of Justice officials listed the names of nearly two dozen people in late February in the Federal Register. Their crimes ranged from nonviolent drug offenses to bribery and fraud. It includes many who have previously applied for pardons or commutations − but also those who have recently sued the department.
In one notable case, the Justice Department restored the rights of Jake Hoffman, an Arizona state senator charged in the state’s fake elector scheme to keep Trump in the White House in 2020. Trump already pardoned Hoffman for any federal charges, but since he's facing a state indictment in Arizona, he's federally prohibited from buying new firearms. Hoffman declined to comment when reached by USA TODAY.
Federal law generally prohibits felons from possessing guns. It also blocks gun sales to those convicted of misdeamenor domestic violence. Now, the Trump administration is ramping up a relief procedure that's been dormant since 1992 to make it easier for nonviolent felons to get their gun rights back. Gun groups are eager for that program to start, said Adam Kraut, executive director of the Second Amendment Foundation.
The problem, though, is that as we go along, anti-gun states keep trying to find new offenses to add to the list of prohibiting convictions. We've seen them try to claim that DUIs should result in a loss of gun rights, and that will just keep creeping on along until the list is so long that no one will be able to have a gun.
And we're never going to completely stop that kind of mission creep. Anti-gun states will keep trying, and the truth is that some of these offenses are things that no one wants to defend in the first place. Take domestic violence. Does anyone really want to defend wife beaters? Hell no. Anyone who does that is a piece of crap, and we all know it.
But if it's bad enough to warrant a loss of rights, why isn't it a felony charge? That's been my take on it from the start, but I think it's about making sure that at least some misdemeanors are listed so more misdemeanors can be added later, and the precedent is set.
Which could be fine to some degree, except that, as things have stood for years, there was no chance of getting your rights restored for any of these things, felonies or not. You could never completely escape that one mistake of the past. That, too, was by design.
While we can't stop anti-gun states from being anti-gun, no matter how much we want to.
That's why a rights restoration process is so important. It's a bulwark, to some degree, against some of this. Yeah, we might lose our rights when we shouldn't, but there's at least a chance of getting them back at some point down the line.
As people get their rights restored and continue to live and work as productive members of society, it'll make it clear that not everyone who has been convicted of some wrongdoing is a hardened criminal for life who deserves to be stripped of their rights forever.
That'll make it harder to justify stripping people of their rights for various things that aren't violent felonies.
Any of us can make a mistake. There's at least one case where a woman got a felony conviction for floating a check for groceries. A lot of us have bounced checks, though maybe not for that amount of money. All it takes, though, is the scale of our mistake to be too big and we're shut out of our gun rights forever.
Unless we can get them restored.
It might not ever be us who needs it, but it also could be any of us.
