You too can be Irony King (or other monarch) of the week by going here and giving your address. They send you one of these bumper stickers free. The site says it’ll take 4-6 weeks to ship, but that’s still plenty of time before the primaries.
In other news, there’s a promising verdict from the North Carolina Superior Court (opinion linked at Volokh) upholding a felon’s right to keep and bear arms.
Before you flinch at that, bear in mind that one can be punished as a felon for crimes that do little or no real harm to anyone. Rehabilitation or decades of clean living don’t matter: a felony conviction of any sort is a lifetime ban from owning firearms. However, if the right to keep and bear arms is a fundamental liberty (as the Supreme Court ruled in McDonald), can felons be denied its exercise forever? After all, they still have rights to freedom of speech and legal counsel, right?
In Johnston v. North Carolina, the court seems to agree.
Felons do not lose their First Amendment right to freedom of speech or their Sixth Amendment right to have an attorney represent them in subsequent criminal cases. Laws attempting to divest them of those rights would be struck down as unconstitutional with very little debate. Our citizen’s rights under the Second Amendment to the Constitution are fundamental liberty interests.
Plaintiff Richard Johnston was convicted of several felonies in 1978, but has been law-abiding ever since. At one point, he regained the right to keep guns in the home, albeit with some restrictions. The passage of the Felony Firearms Act in 2004 retroactively made possession of those guns a felony, and Mr. Johnston surrendered them rather than risk further trouble.
I hadn’t been following this one, mostly because I thought challenges to felony bans wouldn’t have much chance of success at this point. I’m glad to be proven wrong. While the court isn’t articulating a standard of scrutiny, they’re placing quite a burden on the state.
It should be clear that the Court is not hereby holding that the State cannot constitutionally regulate firearms possessions by felons. It may. But the Court has, and is, ruling that a felony conviction by itself does not divest felons of their fundamental constitutional rights. In order to constitutionally regulate this fundamental right under a civil regulatory scheme, the State must provide procedural due process both before the deprivation of the right and at substantially related times post-deprivation, so as to allow a review of the determination that the citizen suffering the deprivation is within the class of citizens who pose the threat addressed by the felon firearm prohibition. The citizen subject to such a deprivation must have an opportunity to be heard and to present evidence on the issue of whether he should be divested of, or continue to be divested of, that fundamental liberty interest. The present Felony Firearm Act, N.C. Gen. Stat. § 14-415.1 does not do this. Every citizen, regardless of prior convictions, is entitled to such due process of law. No citizen should ever be deprived of a fundamental constitutional right on any rationale without having an opportunity to be heard on that issue.
The opinion finds the act unconstitutional on the grounds that it is not “narrowly focused,” and that it is not “substantially related” to the government interest it aims to protect. Though they make it clear that this verdict is only meant to apply to this particular set of circumstances, it’s an important precedent.