Braddic Deshaun Rollerson v. United States

I. Circuit courts of appeals applying Heller, Bruen, and Rahimi have adopted markedly different approaches to testing 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(1)’s constitutionality, but each has overlooked three important points about the text and history of the Second Amendment. First, the right to keep and bear arms belongs to “the people,” and on its plain meaning, that term of art includes ex-offenders. Second, at the Founding, there was no tradition of premising the right to keep or bear arms on the absence of a criminal record. Third, all of the contemporary textual and constitutional evidence points in the opposite direction. A criminal conviction might disqualify an ex-offender from holding office or voting, but not a single American jurisdiction exempted the same class from those protected by the Second Amendment or its state-level analogues. The question presented is: Whether there is an obvious and irreconcilable clash between § 922(g)(1) and the rights protected by the Second Amendment.