In 1989, Larry Hatfield fudged his employment records to get some extra money from the Railroad Retirement Board. He was caught and pled guilty to the federal crime of making a false statement, and was sentenced to a fine and (at the government’s recommendation) no prison time. Since then, Hatfield has lived his life without incident, incurring nary as much as a parking ticket. He doesn’t fight, do drugs, or cause problems. Hatfield has lived as a completely law-abiding citizen for decades.
Hatfield’s neighborhood, however, has changed for the worst, so he wants to own a firearm to defend himself in his home. But the intersection of an odd federal law—18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(1)—and the ever-expanding idea of what a “felony” is has seen his right to keep and bear arms stripped away. That old conviction for lying to the Retirement Board now restricts his right to armed self-defense. While his conduct in 1989 was not upstanding, permanently stripping Hatfield of his core Second Amendment right seems an excessive punishment—one that puts the government in the interesting position of having argued that Hatfield is both so non-dangerous so as to have been recommended zero days in prison, but so dangerous that he can never be trusted with a gun.
Read more at https://www.cato.org/blog/nonviolent-felons-shouldnt-lose-their-second-amendment-rights
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