BELLEVUE, Wash. — Oct. 21, 2026 — The Second Amendment Foundation and National Rifle Association have filed an amicus brief in United States v. Cordova, urging the Fifth Circuit to adopt a dangerousness standard to challenges of lifetime federal firearms bans.
The case returns to the Fifth Circuit after the court granted rehearing en banc and vacated the panel opinion. The brief filed today urges the court to hold that historical tradition supports disarming only dangerous persons – those with a proven proclivity for violence or who pose a threat to the government – not every person convicted of a felony. Colonial and Founding-era restrictions targeted the dangerous. Militia laws required able-bodied men to keep arms and contained no exemption for prior nonviolent convictions, and some statutes even expressly protected criminals’ arms from seizure.
“History disarmed the dangerous, not the peaceable,” said SAF Director of Legal Research and Education Kostas Moros. “A nonviolent felony is not a lifetime forfeiture of the right to keep and bear arms.”
The brief also rejects the metric, adopted in an earlier Fifth Circuit decision, that treats a lifetime ban as justified whenever the predicate offense was a felony punishable by death at the Founding. Many Founding-era felonies were not capital. Those who completed their sentences were not left disarmed – they were often required to bear arms under the militia acts. Using historical eligibility for the death penalty as a proxy for permanent disarmament would treat the Second Amendment as a second-class right, since no other Bill of Rights guarantee is forfeited on that basis.
“There is no tradition of permanently stripping the right to keep and bear arms from peaceable citizens, including nonviolent felons who completed their sentences,” said SAF Executive Director Adam Kraut. “The Fifth Circuit should make clear that dangerousness, not the mere existence of a felony conviction, is the standard. Peaceable Americans who have paid their debt to society should not be forced to surrender their right to keep and bear arms for the remainder of their lives.”
For more information visit SAF.org.
The Second Amendment Foundation (saf.org) is the nation’s oldest and largest tax-exempt education, research, publishing and legal action group dedicated to safeguarding and promoting the fundamental rights of individuals enshrined in the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution. SAF engages in aggressive legal action to ensure the principles of armed self-defense, personal liberty, and the ownership of arms are defended, secured, and restored. Through public education initiatives, SAF teaches the importance of the Second Amendment to promote a society that values and exercises the right to keep and bear arms.
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