In the latest application of the Supreme Court’s Second Amendment jurisprudence, a federal judge from the Southern District of Mississippi, Carlton Reeves, has overturned a man’s conviction for gun possession, declaring that the federal ban on felons owning weapons does not pass constitutional muster under the Second Amendment. 

The man who challenged the ban, Jessie Bullock, argued before the court that his 1992 felony conviction for aggravated assault and manslaughter and his 2015 conviction for attempted assault of a law enforcement officer should not bar him from exercising his constitutional rights. The law banning his ownership of firearms, known as the federal “felon-in-possession ban,” cannot be enforced under the Supreme Court’s interpretations of the Second Amendment, Judge Reeves stated.  

The dismissal authored by Judge Reeves comes just one year after the landmark high court decision in New York State Pistol and Rifle Association v. Bruen, which held that all firearms regulations must be “consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” The opinion, authored by Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, immediately struck down a host of firearms regulations and led many gun control activists to scramble for new regulations.

Although he agreed in this case with Bullock, Judge Reeves did so with biting criticism for the new historical method of interpretation espoused by the high court in Bruen and the justices’ “broad definition of the right to bear arms,” which the judge says began with the District of Columbia v. Heller decision in 2008. 

Authored by Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, Heller held that one is guaranteed the right to bear arms in one’s home for self defense. In his opinion, Judge Reeves criticizes the Heller decision as well as the current justices’ methods for reaching their conclusions. 

“Justice Scalia knew firsthand the risk of cherry‐picking briefs to support one’s ideological priors,” Judge Reeves declared. “Yet it appears that the Court continues to engage in ‘law office history’ — that is, history selected to ‘fit the needs of people looking for ammunition in their causes’ — in Constitutional interpretation.”

Following these criticisms, Judge Reeves ordered that the justices’ methods still must be adhered to even if he may personally disagree with their reasoning. “Nevertheless, the standard announced by the Supreme Court in Bruen is the law of the land,” the judge wrote. “It must be enforced. Under that standard, the government has failed to meet its burden” to convict Bullock. 

The executive director of the Duke University Center on Firearms Law, Andrew Willinger, tells the Sun that the decision from Judge Reeves is especially notable because it affirmed the Second Amendment rights of violent felons. 

“This is really the first I case that I think we’ve seen where a challenge to the felon possession ban has succeeded by someone with a record of committing violent felonies as opposed to nonviolent felonies,” Mr. Willinger says. 

“The Supreme Court, in my opinion, will ultimately need to step in and clarify the interplay between past decisions that are relevant to this question,” he adds. 

During the trial proceedings in 2022, Judge Reeves lambasted the high court from his bench at Jackson. In asking lower courts to consider firearms regulation as either consistent or not with “the Nation’s historical tradition,” jurists are forced to “play historian in the name of constitutional adjudication,” Judge Reeves stated.

The order, issued on October 27, asked both the government and Bullock’s legal team to submit briefs on the question of whether he should appoint a trained historian to aid the court in interpreting the felon-in-possession law.

Judge Reeves’s historical interpretation depends on the ratification of two monumentally important constitutional amendments — the Second and 14th. 

“The federal felon‐in‐possession ban was enacted in 1938, not 1791 or 1868 — the years the Second and Fourteenth Amendments were ratified,” the judge wrote. “The government’s brief in this case does not identify a ‘well‐established and representative historical analogue’ from either era supporting the categorical disarmament of tens of millions of Americans.”

He also espoused the virtues of federalism, writing that “state-level” felon-in-possession laws may pass constitutional muster, but such federal statutes do not comport with the nation’s history. “The government’s arguments for permanently disarming Mr. Bullock … rest upon the mirage of dicta, buttressed by a cloud of law review articles that do not support disarming him,” he wrote.