Criminal-justice reform has been distorted to mean counterproductive policies like eliminating cash bail or politicized district attorneys exhibiting a determined indifference to violence, but there is a place for sensible reforms that allow genuinely rehabilitated offenders to reintegrate into the community of law-abiding citizens.
President Donald Trump and his administration understand this. This is why the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has reestablished the ability for those prohibited from possessing firearms under federal law to apply to get their Second Amendment rights restored.
The Gun Control Act of 1968 (GCA) created the federal categories of individuals prohibited from possessing firearms, which includes those with a felony conviction. It also included a provision (18 U.S.C. § 925 (c)) allowing for individuals who had lost their rights to apply to the federal government for relief from disabilities—a restoration of their gun rights.
The system operated until the early 1990s, when the handgun prohibitionists at Violence Policy Center put out an overwrought report about the purported dangers of the program. In 1992, Congress passed an appropriations rider prohibiting the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) from using any funding to process relief from disabilities applications.
The program lay dormant for 33 years, still on the books but not funded. Litigation to revive it proved unsuccessful. Upon President Trump taking office in January 2025, however, efforts began to reactivate the program.
The relevant statute explicitly gives the U.S. attorney general the authority to administer the relief from disabilities program. The attorney general oversees the entire DOJ, of which ATF is merely one component. ATF is prohibited from using funds to process relief from disabilities applications, but the rest of DOJ isn’t. The Trump administration thus set about moving this vital function out of ATF and into another DOJ component.
In March 2025, DOJ published an interim final rule withdrawing the attorney general’s authorization to operate this program from ATF. On Aug. 20, 2026 DOJ published a final rule reestablishing and setting forth the contours of the procedure, to be administered by the Office of the Pardon Attorney. DOJ will be phasing in the program in stages. Eventually, applications will be submitted through an online portal. Information on timelines, requirements and procedures is available at justice.gov/ffrr.
The GCA’s prohibitions reach much further than just violent and infamous crimes and into such highly politicized areas as technical violations of gun-control laws that are themselves constitutionally problematic. Thus, it is important to us that the relief procedures be fair, accessible and respectful of the Second Amendment.
We did have some misgivings with provisions in the proposed procedures that we addressed in formal comments on the rulemaking. Some were accommodated in the final rule, and others were not. It remains to be seen what administration of the rule will look like in practice.
Reestablishing the federal restoration of rights procedure is also important considering recent U.S. Supreme Court Second Amendment jurisprudence, which underscores that the federal prohibited persons categories are overbroad.
In the NRA-supported case New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022), the Court made clear that for a gun-control measure to pass constitutional muster, “the government must demonstrate that the regulation is consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” In subsequent cases, the Court has suggested that in the prohibited-persons context, this requires a judicial finding of dangerousness.
This year, in U.S. v. Hemani, the Court pared back the federal firearm prohibition for unlawful users of controlled substances (18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(3)), as applied to a marijuana user. In so doing, the Court found no historical analogue for the prohibition and noted, “it is far from obvious that 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(3) confines its reach to those who are categorically and unusually dangerous.”
The 18 U.S.C. §922(g)(1) firearm prohibition for those convicted of a felony is similarly suspect. The prohibition makes no distinction between violent and nonviolent crimes and those who were and were not incarcerated.
As a judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote a dissent in Kanter v. Barr (2019), where she took issue with the categorical felon firearm ban as applied to a nonviolent felon. She explained that such firearm prohibitions must be tied to dangerousness. Justice Neil Gorsuch criticized the proliferation of felony statutes based on arbitrary regulatory line-drawing. And in his Hemani concurrence, Justice Clarence Thomas expressed doubt as to whether the Constitution grants the federal government authority to prohibit mere possession of firearms at all.
The Trump administration’s reinstatement of the restoration of firearm rights procedure is a prudent measure that will help reintegrate reformed individuals into the full rights of citizenship. Until the Court further addresses the prohibited-persons categories, the procedure can also act as a crucial safety-valve to restore the Second Amendment rights of nondangerous individuals who should never have lost them in the first place.
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