DOJ’s new firearm-rights-restoration rule embraces individualized assessment, rehabilitation, passage of time, subsequent conduct, character, and present risk. But for people still required to register, DOJ allows registration status itself to trigger a continuing presumption against restoration. The result is circular: dangerous because registered, registered because dangerous.
The United States Department of Justice has discovered rehabilitation.
People change, DOJ now tells us. A criminal conviction is not necessarily a permanent diagnosis of dangerousness. Time matters. Conduct matters. Character matters. Rehabilitation matters. The circumstances of the offense matter. What a person has done since the offense matters.
And because all of those things matter, the federal government should not permanently strip someone of a constitutional right without asking whether that person actually remains dangerous.
Attorney General Todd Blanche could hardly have stated the principle more clearly when DOJ announced its new Federal Firearm Rights Restoration program:
“The Second Amendment is not a second-class right, and the federal government should not permanently deprive Americans of a constitutional right without regard to whether they pose a danger to public safety.”
That is not our paraphrase. That is the Attorney General of the United States.
For people who have spent years arguing that permanent civil disabilities should not be imposed on the basis of a conviction alone, this sounds almost revolutionary.
DOJ: Permanent categorical disabilities are too crude. We should individually assess risk and character.
People convicted of sex offenses: Great. We have been saying that for years.
DOJ: Not you.
That is, remarkably, what the new rule actually does.
DOJ has articulated a principled case against permanent categorical disabilities, built an individualized restoration process around that principle, and then carved out the population whose central grievance is precisely the denial of individualized assessment.
There is no delicate way to describe that.
It is blatant hypocrisy.
DOJ discovers individualized justice
For more than three decades, the federal statutory mechanism for restoring firearm rights was essentially dormant. Congress had barred the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives from spending appropriated funds to process individual applications under 18 U.S.C. § 925(c).
The statute itself never disappeared.
It says that a person prohibited from possessing firearms may seek relief if the Attorney General is satisfied that the circumstances surrounding the disability and the applicant’s “record and reputation” demonstrate that the person is unlikely to act dangerously and that restoration would not be contrary to the public interest.
DOJ has now revived that process.
And the new system is emphatically individualized.
The Attorney General may examine an applicant’s complete criminal history, the seriousness of the underlying conduct, even conduct associated with charges dismissed as part of a plea agreement. DOJ can examine behavior during incarceration and supervision, the amount of time that has passed since completion of the sentence, behavior during that period, substance use, threats, mental health, information from local law enforcement and, finally, “other relevant individual circumstances.”
Applicants must provide court records, plea agreements where applicable, factual bases, presentence reports, criminal records covering as much as 25 years, fingerprints and character references.
In other words, DOJ does not want a label.
It wants the person.
What happened?
What did you actually do?
What has happened since?
How did you behave in prison?
How did you behave on supervision?
How many years have passed?
What does your recent record show?
What do people who know you say about your character?
Are you dangerous now?
This is the language of individualized justice.
It is also the language that people affected by sex-offense registration laws have been demanding for years.
The government understands that a conviction is not a person
The philosophical premise behind the new rule deserves attention because it is fundamentally sound.
DOJ expressly rejects the idea that someone who was once lawfully disarmed must therefore remain forever outside the protection of the Second Amendment.
Responding to comments arguing that people with felony convictions simply fall outside the Amendment’s protection, DOJ answered that all citizens enjoy Second Amendment protection consistent with constitutional precedent. A person’s conduct may justify disarmament under certain circumstances, DOJ explained, but that does not mean government must treat that person as “permanently and entirely outside the scope” of the constitutional right.
Read that again.
A person’s past conduct may justify a restriction.
But the past does not necessarily define the person permanently.
DOJ even emphasizes that its restoration process goes beyond what courts have required because, in appropriate cases, it permits “an individualized assessment of a person’s fitness to exercise Second Amendment rights” instead of relying exclusively on categorical rules.
That is the federal government making the argument.
Not SOLAR.
Not a civil-rights organization.
Not a defense attorney.
The Department of Justice.
And then DOJ gets to registered people.
Not you
The new regulation establishes several levels of presumptive disqualification.
Some extremely serious offenses create a continuing presumption that can be overcome only through “extraordinary circumstances.” They include homicide, rape or sexual assault, kidnapping, domestic violence, robbery, carjacking, terrorism and other violent conduct. The same continuing presumption applies when someone used or fired a gun or used an explosive while committing a qualifying felony.
Other serious offenses are treated differently.
Drug trafficking gets a ten-year presumption.
So do threats of violence.
So do manufacture, possession, transfer or use of explosives.
So does certain firearm-related conduct.
After ten years from completion of the sentence, those categorical presumptions expire and DOJ may undertake the ordinary individualized inquiry. Most other qualifying felony convictions receive a five-year presumptive period.
Then there is sex-offender registration.
A person who remains required to register under SORNA or a comparable registration law because of the offense that created the federal firearm disability remains presumptively disqualified and must demonstrate “extraordinary circumstances.”
There is no independent five-year expiration.
There is no independent ten-year expiration.
The presumption lasts as long as the registration obligation does.
And unlike the individualized firearms-restoration process DOJ just constructed, the duration of that registration obligation generally was not produced by a contemporary determination that this particular person remains dangerous.
It was produced by a statute.
The circularity is breathtaking
Here is the problem in its simplest form:
DOJ treats him as dangerous because he is still registered.
He is still registered because the government classifies people with his past offense as dangerous.
That is the circle.
The government first creates the label because it assumes danger, then later cites the label as proof of the danger it originally assumed.
Nothing new has been established.
No fresh finding of dangerousness has entered the equation.
The person may have completed his sentence years ago. He may have lived without another offense for ten, fifteen, or twenty years. He may have an exemplary supervision history, strong character references, stable employment, family support, and every other marker DOJ says matters when evaluating other people with felony convictions.
For them, those facts can change the answer.
For him, the registry can answer the question before those facts are ever allowed to carry the same weight.
That is what makes the new policy so revealing.
DOJ has just built an entire restoration process around the proposition that past conduct should not permanently substitute for present risk.
But registration does exactly that.
The original offense creates the registration status.
The registration status is then treated as evidence of present dangerousness.
And that supposed dangerousness becomes the justification for withholding the ordinary individualized assessment DOJ says is necessary to determine whether someone is actually dangerous.
Dangerous because registered. Registered because dangerous.
The registry becomes both the premise and the proof.
That is not individualized risk assessment.
It is a government-created presumption validating itself.
And DOJ cannot claim nobody pointed this out.
They did.
DOJ was warned about exactly this problem
During the rulemaking process, commenters specifically objected to using registration status as a presumptive disqualifier.
They told DOJ that sex-offender registration does not constitute an “assessment of ongoing dangerousness.” They argued that it instead creates continuing status from past conduct. They challenged the assumption that registration duration reflects actual individual risk and asked DOJ to replace the continuing presumption with a time-limited one.
The comments went directly to the contradiction.
SORNA, they argued, “does not reflect actual individual risk, public threat, or recidivism likelihood.” It uses offense classifications rather than the particular facts and circumstances of the individual person.
That is almost exactly the problem DOJ’s own firearms-restoration program is supposed to solve.
DOJ heard the argument.
DOJ understood the argument.
DOJ rejected it.
And the government’s explanation may be even more revealing than the rule itself.
DOJ pretends the registry is a risk assessment
According to DOJ, SORNA’s tier system adequately answers the concern because longer registration periods are attached to offenses the government considers more serious.
DOJ wrote that people with “less dangerous offenses” will be removed from registration sooner and that SORNA is therefore “properly calibrated to retain the most dangerous offenders on the registry for longer periods.”
That statement is extraordinary.
SORNA is an offense-based classification system.
It is not an individualized actuarial risk assessment.
A Tier III designation does not ordinarily mean that a clinician evaluated one person and concluded that he presents a greater current risk than a Tier I registrant.
It does not mean that a probation officer revisited the person’s circumstances ten years later.
It does not mean a contemporary Static-99R, STABLE-2007, CPORT or other validated risk instrument found him unusually dangerous.
It means that Congress assigned a particular offense to a particular statutory tier.
DOJ has therefore taken a historical offense classification, converted it into a registration status, and then converted that registration status back into evidence of current dangerousness.
The circularity could hardly be cleaner.
DOJ built a firearm-restoration process specifically because the offense alone does not always answer the present-risk question.
Then DOJ defended excluding registered people by pointing to another classification system built substantially from the offense alone.
Apparently ten years can transform a drug trafficker
The contrast with drug trafficking makes the hypocrisy impossible to ignore.
Under the new rule, a person convicted of manufacturing, importing, distributing or dispensing controlled substances—or possessing them with intent to do so—faces a ten-year presumptive barrier after completing the sentence.
After that period, the special presumption expires.
The government can then ask who that person is today.
This is not because DOJ thinks drug trafficking is harmless.
It obviously does not.
The rule simply recognizes that time and subsequent conduct matter.
A person can commit a serious felony, complete a substantial sentence, spend years living lawfully, and eventually deserve a new assessment rather than a permanent assumption.
That is rehabilitation.
The same rule extends similar logic even to certain firearm and explosives offenses.
The government understands perfectly well that serious criminal categories contain individuals with very different histories, circumstances and present risk.
But for a registered person, an old nonviolent, non-coercive, noncontact, online-only sex offense by the defendant—such as simple possession of illegal sexual images—can continue supplying the presumption for as long as a registration statute keeps the label attached.
That does not minimize the harm represented in the illegal material. It distinguishes that hypothetical applicant’s conduct from offenses involving physical violence, coercion, threats, firearm use, or contact offending by the defendant when DOJ is supposedly assessing firearm dangerousness.
Imagine the comparison.
One person participated in a serious drug-trafficking operation. Weapons may have been present. Associates may have used violence. A gun charge may never have resulted in conviction. Ten years after sentence completion, DOJ is prepared to examine the actual person: his criminal history, his conduct, his character, his prison record, his supervision history and his intervening years.
Another person was convicted of simple possession arising from nonviolent, non-coercive, noncontact, online-only conduct by the defendant. No firearm was involved. No threat was involved. No physical contact occurred. No coercion was alleged. Twenty years later, he has no subsequent convictions and an exemplary record.
But he lives in a jurisdiction requiring him to remain registered.
DOJ’s answer is not:
Let’s determine what risk this person actually presents today.
It is:
He is still registered. Therefore he begins with a presumption against restoration.
The distinction is not based on a contemporary finding that he is more dangerous than the drug trafficker.
It is based on the continued existence of the label.
That is not a coherent application of the principle DOJ just announced.
It is a population-specific exception to it.
DOJ already knows how to look behind labels
The inconsistency becomes even more difficult to excuse when we look elsewhere within the same Department of Justice.
The Federal Bureau of Prisons issued a new Categorization of Offenses Program Statement in March 2026.
That policy distinguishes formal “crimes of violence” from other offenses that may nevertheless affect eligibility for particular programs. BOP can examine underlying conduct, sentencing enhancements and presentence reports instead of pretending the title of a conviction tells the whole story.
PATTERN—the federal risk-assessment system used by BOP—has its own separate list of offenses used for the “instant violent offense” variable.
These systems are not identical, and they serve different legal purposes.
That is precisely the point.
The federal government is perfectly capable of distinguishing among:
a sex offense,
a violent offense,
a firearm offense,
the actual conduct underlying a conviction,
and an individualized risk determination.
Indeed, the current BOP Program Statement expressly lists § 2251 and § 2251A in its relevant crime-of-violence categorization while § 2252 and § 2252A are not included there.
The separate published PATTERN violent-offense range reaches “2251–2252,” which under ordinary statutory citation convention encompasses § 2251, § 2251A and § 2252, but stops before § 2252A.
So a person convicted under § 2252A can occupy a remarkable position:
His offense is not listed as a crime of violence in that new BOP categorization.
It is not included in the published PATTERN instant-violent-offense statutory range.
Yet if that conviction produces an ongoing registration obligation, the firearms-restoration rule can treat the registration status itself as sufficient to trigger a continuing presumption against restoration.
The government does not arrive there because it has already established that every such offense is violent.
The registration label is independently doing the work.
Sexual recidivism is not firearm dangerousness
DOJ also responded to commenters who argued that some registered populations have very low recidivism rates.
Rather than seriously engaging the breadth of modern risk literature, DOJ complained that commenters had not supplied the studies they referenced and cited a 2015 SMART Office research brief warning that short follow-up periods can understate sexual recidivism.
That is an astonishingly thin answer to the question DOJ actually has to answer.
Suppose we grant DOJ every benefit of the doubt.
Suppose some studies underestimate sexual recidivism.
Suppose longer follow-up produces higher cumulative rates.
Suppose sexual offending presents unique measurement difficulties.
None of that establishes the proposition that matters here:
Does this individual present an elevated risk of dangerous firearm use?
Sexual recidivism risk and firearm-violence risk are not interchangeable concepts.
Someone may present an elevated risk of one without presenting an elevated risk of the other.
Someone may present a low risk of both.
Someone may present a high risk of firearm violence despite having no history of sexual offending whatsoever.
That is why individualized assessment exists.
Yet DOJ invokes generalized discussion of sexual recidivism to defend a firearms presumption while simultaneously proclaiming that the whole purpose of its new process is to determine whether the particular applicant is likely to act in a manner dangerous to public safety.
Again:
Individualized assessment when DOJ wants it.
Categorical inference when the population changes.
The registry becomes evidence of itself
This has implications far beyond guns.
For decades, governments have defended sex-offense registration by insisting that registration is not additional punishment. It is regulatory. It exists because government has identified a public-safety concern.
Now another government program points to the existence of that regulation and says, effectively:
See? This person must still be dangerous. Look how heavily we regulate him.
The government first creates the label because it assumes danger, then later cites the label as proof of the danger it originally assumed.
The regulatory burden becomes evidence supporting another regulatory burden.
That is how a categorical system becomes self-validating.
The government assigns a person a status because of an old conviction.
The status produces years or decades of restrictions.
Other agencies encounter the status.
They interpret the existence of the status as evidence of present risk.
That perceived risk justifies additional restrictions.
Then those additional restrictions become further evidence that this must indeed be an extraordinarily dangerous population.
At no point does anyone have to return to the original empirical question:
What risk does this person actually present today?
That is precisely the question DOJ insists must be asked when restoring firearm rights to other people with felony convictions.
We are not arguing that everyone should have a gun
This article does not require anyone to believe that every person convicted of a crime should possess firearms.
It does not require agreement about the Second Amendment.
It does not require opposition to every presumptive disqualifier.
DOJ may reasonably conclude that particular histories involving homicide, armed robbery, domestic violence, firearm misuse or other conduct justify unusually demanding scrutiny.
That is not the issue.
The issue is whether the principle DOJ has just announced means anything.
If past criminal conduct does not necessarily establish present dangerousness, that principle does not magically become false when the words sex offender appear.
If ten or twenty years of lawful conduct can demonstrate rehabilitation, those years do not lose their evidentiary value because a legislature assigned someone a twenty-five-year registration term.
If character matters, it matters.
If conduct matters, it matters.
If time matters, it matters.
If individualized circumstances matter, they matter.
And if registration status itself accurately establishes present dangerousness, DOJ should prove that proposition rather than treating the existence of the registry as proof of the assumptions that created it.
The hypocrisy is the point
The hypocrisy here is not subtle.
DOJ has announced that the federal government should not permanently strip people of a constitutional right without considering whether they actually remain dangerous.
It has created a process capable of examining decades of criminal history, prison behavior, supervision performance, dismissed charges, substance use, mental health, law-enforcement information, character references and “other relevant individual circumstances.”
It recognizes that drug traffickers can change.
It recognizes that people convicted of firearm offenses can change.
It recognizes that people convicted of serious felonies can change.
It recognizes that time without additional crime tells us something.
It recognizes that the statute of conviction is not always enough.
It recognizes that categorical exclusion can be too crude.
It even tells courts and commenters that past conduct may justify disarmament without placing a person “permanently and entirely outside” the right, and that individualized assessment may be appropriate even when categorical disarmament would be legally available.
Then DOJ reaches sex-offender registration and defends a continuing presumption by insisting that SORNA is calibrated to keep the “most dangerous offenders” registered for longer periods.
That is the hypocrisy in its clearest form.
Individualized present-risk assessment for favored categories.
A government-created danger label treated as proof of danger for registered people.
And then it reaches the population that has spent years saying:
Please stop treating our past conviction as a permanent diagnosis.
Please assess actual risk.
Please distinguish offense categories from individual people.
Please consider rehabilitation.
Please consider the passage of time.
Please stop assuming a legal label itself proves present dangerousness.
The Department of Justice has finally answered:
Those are excellent principles.
For everyone else.
The federal government has now embraced the proposition that a conviction should not permanently answer the question of who someone is today.
It simply has not decided that the proposition applies to everyone.
- U.S. Department of Justice — DOJ’s announcement of the Federal Firearm Rights Restoration program
- Federal Register — the final DOJ firearm-rights-restoration rule
- Legal Information Institute — 18 U.S.C. § 925(c)
- Legal Information Institute — SORNA’s tier definitions
- Legal Information Institute — SORNA’s registration durations
- Federal Bureau of Prisons — BOP Program Statement 5162.06
- Federal Bureau of Prisons — BOP’s PATTERN information page
- Federal Bureau of Prisons — PATTERN violent-offense-code list
- Legal Information Institute — 18 U.S.C. § 2252
- Legal Information Institute — 18 U.S.C. § 2252A