A man had all his guns confiscated by the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) federal agency, due to a mistake he made 15 years ago. Jeramy Wilburn, 34 years old, lives in Allen Park, only 16 minutes away from Detroit, Michigan. The reason the guns were confiscated was because Wilburn had been convicted of a misdemeanor domestic violence charge in 2008. As punishment, the judge ordered him to be put on probation and he had to take a domestic violence class. There was no jail time. In February 2022 the charge was expunged, meaning it was removed from his record. Under federal law, someone convicted of domestic violence (the conviction is from a state government) is not legally permitted to have guns for the rest of their life, unless they file a petition and the ATF approves restoring their rights. (Historically, in the U.S. this began with the Gun Act of 1968 ) Wilburn is has filed a suit to try to get his guns back and have the right to have guns. A court has not yet responded and the process is likely to take more than a year. The details of the case are not clear but it looks like the ATF is refusing to grant his petition to restore his rights, with the reason that he "could be convicted of a domestic violence charge" again. His attorney Barton Morris had this to say: "It's unfair for them to say he should be forever barred, forever prohibited from carrying a firearm just because he potentially could get a second offense. I could see if I was an ongoing violent offender or somebody who broke the law constantly. Maybe that may be true. But for somebody who messed up as a kid and got their life straight and going straight now, I wouldn't see why not." "Man sues ATF for taking guns after expungement", Fox News 2 Detroit, by Staff and Amber Ainsworth, December 28, 2023
Thanks again to this forum for reminding me that not all Americans have as much freedom as we have here. It must be cherished since its easy to see how easily it can be taken away.
the "yes dear" Lautenberg amendment is odious. A misdemeanor should not be sufficient to strip someone of their constitutional rights
In the system of logic, I think this comes down to oversimplification, thinking that somehow we can simply categorize crimes into simple groups. Of course no one doubts gun rights should be permanently taken away when the crime is armed robbery, but there are plenty of other crimes that are classified as felonies where I believe it is wrong to have the law automatically take away their lifetime rights and then require special approval, years after the fact, to get those rights back. A little bit of an equivocation fallacy at play too. When most people hear the words "domestic violence", they tend to think of the worst forms of domestic violence, women who've been battered and abused over a long period of time, or seriously assaulted and injured by a despicable man who has uncontrollable violent tendencies. But the problem is, it's not so simple to just shoehorn different situations under the same heading and treat all those people the same. A man who shoves his wife back after she gets in his face and screams at the top of her lungs is not the same as other men who abuse their girlfriends or wives, yet both may be guilty of "domestic violence". If we're not careful, we tend to lump those situations together, just assuming they are all the same, thinking one is the same as the other. In my view, either the law needs to get much more detailed into specifics, or the issue of rights being taken after prison away should be decided at trial, preferably by the judge and jury. Part of the reason for this stupid domestic violence law was to try to protect women. But I think there must be other ways to deal with it. What if, for example, there was some sort of protective order a woman could seek against a man who is living with him to bar him from being able to have a gun. But have it written into the law (without any need to seek special approval from anyone) that the man will automatically have all his rights restored so long as he is no longer living with or visiting that woman, after maybe 8 weeks of no longer seeing her. And it would be considered a violation of the law for him to spend time with her while still having guns for a period of 9 months after the woman sought the protective order. Unless she is willing to sign a paper in the presence of witnesses restoring his right while consenting to see him. There are creative solutions like that, instead of simple blanket bans.
