Three of the biggest names in the gun rights world just teamed up to take on one of the ugliest features of federal firearms law: the permanent disarmament of people who committed nonviolent crimes and have long since gone straight. If this sounds familiar, it should — this is the second time in roughly a year the same three groups have brought this fight to the Supreme Court.
The Firearms Policy Coalition announced it had joined with the National Rifle Association and the Second Amendment Foundation to file an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in Johnson v. United States. The brief, dated October 1, urges the justices to take up a challenge to the government’s lifetime gun ban for people convicted of nonviolent offenses under 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(1).
The Case
Joseph Johnson’s lone predicate offense is a 2015 state marijuana-cultivation conviction. He has no violent crime on his record. The marijuana conviction didn’t even draw prison time — Johnson got probation, and the probation terminated early. The firearm charge that triggered his § 922(g)(1) prosecution came eight years later and in a different state, with no connection to the drug offense beyond the felony label itself. Under federal law, though, he’s permanently barred from owning firearms or ammunition.
The Tenth Circuit rejected his Second Amendment challenge, pointing to precedent that flatly forbids as-applied challenges to the federal statute barring felons from possessing firearms, no matter how nonviolent the underlying crime. In other words, the court never asked whether this particular guy is dangerous. The rule simply doesn’t allow the question.
That ruling puts the Tenth Circuit on the opposite side of a widening circuit split. The Third Circuit restored Bryan Range’s gun rights three years ago after a 1995 welfare-fraud conviction left him disarmed for nearly three decades. The Fifth Circuit went further earlier this year, striking down § 922(g)(1) as applied to a nonviolent drug offender in a January 2026 decision. The Tenth Circuit, in Johnson, held the opposite. SCOTUS tends to take cases when circuits start issuing contradictory rulings on the same federal statute, which is why this cert petition has a legitimate shot at being heard.
The Argument
The brief leans on history. It argues that America’s tradition allows for disarming those who were deemed dangerous, not for taking guns away from peaceable people for life over a nonviolent felony. Historically, nonviolent offenders kept their Second Amendment rights, and in certain cases militia laws actually obligated them to keep firearms.
The amici also take aim at the idea that Heller‘s “presumptively lawful” language shields these laws from challenge. Under Bruen and Rahimi, they argue, the government bears the burden of justifying any gun restriction by pointing to the nation’s historical tradition, and no such tradition supports permanently disarming peaceable people. The brief contends that the Tenth Circuit effectively converted Heller‘s presumption of lawfulness into a conclusive rule — closing the courthouse door to the very as-applied challenges Bruen and Rahimi were supposed to open.
“The government does not get to turn a decade-old marijuana conviction into a lifetime ban on exercising a constitutionally protected right,” said FPC President Brandon Combs, who pledged the group would “Fight Forward until we end this unconstitutional and immoral lifetime gun ban.”
SAF Director of Legal Research and Education Kostas Moros put it plainly: “A permanent ban with no path to restoration is simply not how our tradition worked.”
SAF Executive Director Adam Kraut added the practical frame: “A conviction for a nonviolent offense should not automatically require a lifetime forfeiture of a person’s right to keep and bear arms.”
Why This Matters Now
Johnson isn’t landing in a vacuum. The Supreme Court has already granted certiorari in United States v. Hemani, which challenges § 922(g)(3) — the parallel federal ban on firearm possession by unlawful users of controlled substances, including state-legal marijuana consumers. If the Court is willing to tackle one subsection of § 922(g) in Hemani, taking Johnson in the same term to tackle § 922(g)(1) is a natural companion move. Together, the two cases would let the justices rebuild the entire federal firearms-prohibitions framework around Rahimi‘s “dangerousness” standard rather than the current “any felony conviction, forever” rule.
That’s happening alongside administrative movement in the same direction. AG Todd Blanche and former Pardon Attorney Ed Martin finalized the 18 U.S.C. § 925(c) rights-restoration rule in August, giving nonviolent prohibited persons an administrative path to petition for restoration of their gun rights after decades of Congressional defunding had rendered the statute dormant. Martin has since launched Firearm Rights for Americans to help individuals navigate that process. Johnson would accomplish judicially what 925(c) does administratively — but with the force of a constitutional ruling that no future administration could unwind by rulemaking.
The question underneath all of this is whether the Trump DOJ actually defends § 922(g)(1) at the Supreme Court the way Blanche’s confirmation testimony committed to defending federal gun statutes. Blanche’s DOJ walked away from the silencer NFA appeal in the Silencer Shop Foundation case last month at Trump’s personal direction. Whether they walk away from Johnson, defend it reflexively, or carve out a position that supports the Court narrowing § 922(g)(1) is the single most important thing to watch between now and the cert conference.
The Bottom Line
The Hemani cert grant plus the Johnson filing plus the 925(c) rule plus the Blanche-Martin administrative pivot adds up to the most serious coordinated push against the federal firearms-prohibitions framework since the law was written in 1968.
Peaceable people with decades-old nonviolent convictions have been waiting for the system to acknowledge that the lifetime ban was never consistent with the historical tradition the Supreme Court has now built the Second Amendment doctrine around. SCOTUS doesn’t have to grant cert in Johnson to move this fight forward — the Fifth Circuit and Third Circuit have already created favorable precedent in their jurisdictions — but a cert grant and a decision on the merits would end the question nationally.
The justices will decide whether to take the case within the next few months. If they do, this becomes a defining Second Amendment ruling of the term. If they don’t, the circuit split keeps widening, and the next cert petition won’t be far behind.
