On June 2, the Fifth Circuit decided United States v. Squire, which posed "a novel question about whether the Second Amendment protects a convicted drug trafficker from being dispossessed of a firearm inside his home based on our Nation's historical tradition of firearm regulation." As Senior Judge Edith Brown Clement wrote in the opinion, "our historical tradition supports disarming drug traffickers based on their dangerousness…."
Suspecting him of involvement in a shooting in New Orleans, police secured a warrant to search the home of Curtis Squire, where they found a handgun. While the handgun was not found to have been used in the shooting, Squire was charged with felon-in-possession, 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(1), based on his prior convictions of conspiracy and substantive counts of possession with the intent to distribute heroin, possession of a firearm with a controlled dangerous substance, and obstruction of justice. In the same case, he had been convicted of a conspiracy count to possess stolen things, and in another case, burglary and unauthorized use of a motor vehicle.
Fifth Circuit precedent recognized § 922(g)(1) to be unconstitutional as applied to some felons, as "[s]imply classifying a crime as a felony does not meet the level of historical rigor required by Bruen and its progeny." Non-violent felonies such as marijuana possession without evidence of present intoxication were subject to as-applied challenges. As the court wisely wrote, "If Congress could escape Bruen's reach by simply classifying a crime as a felony, we would be confined to uncritically rubber-stamping class-based determinations, subjecting disarmament laws to a form of rational-basis, government-always-wins, type of review." Those words are worth their weight in gold.
