The appeals court ruled that permanently stripping Edward Williams of his right to keep and bear arms on account of a 2005 DUI conviction was unconstitutional.
Edward Williams lost the constitutional right to possess firearms as a consequence of a 2005 DUI case in Pennsylvania, a fact he only fully understood a decade later. His confusion is understandable given how the law is often described.
The federal statute that stripped Williams of his Second Amendment protections is usually framed as applying to “felons,” yet Williams’ offense was technically a misdemeanor. Although his sentence did not involve imprisonment, the crime could have carried a prison term of up to five years. That potential subjected him to 18 U.S.C. 922(g)(1), which applies to anyone convicted of “a crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year.”
Once a lawyer pointed out this nuance, which turned Williams’ continued gun ownership into a federal felony, he disposed of his firearms. Yet he did not view that requirement as fair, reasonable, or constitutional, and this week a federal appellate court shared that view. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit recognized a historical tradition of disarming “physically dangerous individuals” whose gun ownership posed a risk to public safety, but concluded that Williams does not fall into that category.
“The federal government spent nearly a decade trying to permanently disarm a peaceable man over a nonviolent misdemeanor—and it lost bigly,” says Brandon Combs, president of the Firearms Policy Coalition, which supported Williams’ lawsuit. “The government does not get to turn a nonviolent conviction into a lifetime ban on exercising a constitutionally protected right.”
The Third Circuit’s en banc ruling in Williams v. Attorney General upholds a 2023 decision by a federal judge who likewise found Williams’ disarmament unconstitutional. It elaborates on the reasoning behind Range v. Attorney General, a 2023 decision that restored the gun rights of a Pennsylvania man convicted of food-stamp fraud. In both cases, the court held that applying Section 922(g)(1) to the plaintiffs did not align with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation—precisely the approach mandated by the Supreme Court’s 2022 Bruen decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen.
In delivering the majority opinion, Third Circuit Judge Paul Matey notes that the Supreme Court has described longstanding prohibitions on felons possessing firearms as “presumptively lawful.” Yet those longstanding prohibitions targeted the violently dangerous—some felons included—not felons as a broad category. “Felons were restricted because they posed a physical danger, rather than for the mere fact of a conviction,” he writes.
Matey argues that concentrating on physical danger corrects the mistaken notion that only law-abiding, responsible citizens can exercise Second Amendment rights—an idea the Supreme Court rejected in United States v. Rahimi. “We find no history that supports disarming irresponsible people, where ‘responsible’ is defined by the whim of the sovereign or the will of the majority,” he states, warning against letting legislators erode the Second Amendment through expanding criminalization of conduct.
Matey highlights the novelty of permanently restricting all felons from firearm possession for lawful purposes. The original restriction, enacted as part of the Federal Firearms Act in 1938, targeted violent crimes such as murder, manslaughter, rape, kidnapping, robbery, and assault with a deadly weapon. In 1961, Congress broadened the ban to cover nonviolent offenses punishable by more than a year in prison.
Williams’ 2005 DUI conviction satisfied two criteria. He had a prior DUI arrest from 2000 in State College, and a subsequent arrest in Philadelphia four years later yielded a blood-alcohol concentration of 0.223 percent. This second offense was classified as a first-degree misdemeanor, carrying a maximum penalty of five years in prison.
Since then, Williams has stayed out of trouble. “He has committed no violence, let alone danger, for more than two decades, and he has maintained stable employment for more than thirty years,” Matey notes. Williams drinks only infrequently, and a psychological evaluation described him as having a normal personality, with no psychopathology, addiction, or violent tendencies.
Nevertheless, the Justice Department argued that Williams’ ongoing disarmament is consistent with the Bruen framework, which requires historically analogous measures to be “relevantly similar” in motive and scope. In making that argument, the government leaned heavily on early statutes aimed at “habitual drunkards”—the very analogy the Supreme Court rejected in the 2023 decision Hemani, which concerned the federal ban on firearm possession by “unlawful” drug users.
Although the Department of Justice concedes that Williams’ possession could be proscribed only if he “presently poses a physical danger if armed,” Matey notes that it offers no evidence connecting this to the purpose behind the habitual drunkard laws. Those laws, as the Supreme Court observed in Hemani, did not primarily seek to shield the public from violence; instead, they aimed to protect habitual drunkards from harming themselves and their families financially.
Moreover, those habitual drunkard statutes did not permanently strip individuals of their rights. Most limited the commitment of habitual drunkards to the state asylum, prison, or hard labor for a finite period, while others allowed indefinite confinement but did not indicate that, upon release, the right to bear arms would remain forfeited. Rather, once someone was deemed “safe” to resume free life, they were restored to full rights.
Contrary to the considerations that the Supreme Court found persuasive in Hemani, the Justice Department has not shown that Williams poses a risk of misusing a gun while intoxicated or that alcohol abuse would create danger to himself or others. In fact, the record shows that, just as some nineteenth-century drunkards who were released regained their rights, Williams currently poses no significant physical danger from firearm use or anything else.
The Third Circuit is one of three federal appellate courts to permit individuals with nonviolent felony records to challenge the application of Section 922(g)(1) as applied to them. However, such challenges have been blocked in six circuits, despite compelling historical evidence that the law reaches far beyond what the Second Amendment allows. To date, the Supreme Court has declined to hear any of the numerous petitions seeking resolution of this circuit split.
