A helpful lawyer made sure I saw this week’s important new ruling by a Third Circuit panel in Pitsilides v. Barr, No. 21-3320 (3d Cir. Feb. 10, 2025) (available here). I highly recommend the Pitsilides ruling in full, especially because the Third Circuit, thanks to its prior Range rulings (see here and here), has been the leading court giving concrete meaning to the Suprmere Court’s Second Amendment jurisprudence in the context of federal law’s broad criminal prohibition on gun possession for persons with certain criminal records.
Though all 20 pages of Pitsilides merit a close read, here are excerpts (with some cites and footnotes removed) that seem to capture the heart of this interesting decisions:
[W]hile Rahimi and Range II did not purport to comprehensively define the metes and bounds of justifiable burdens on the Second Amendment right, they do, at a minimum, show that disarmament is justified as long as a felon continues to “present a special danger of misus[ing firearms],” Rahimi, 602 U.S. at 698, in other words, when he would likely “pose[] a physical danger to others” if armed, Range II, 124 F.4th at 232. Indeed, as Judge Bibas presciently observed even before Bruen, “[a]s an original matter, the Second Amendment’s touchstone is dangerousness,” Folajtar v. Att’y Gen., 980 F.3d 897, 924 (3d Cir. 2020) (Bibas, J., dissenting); see also Kanter v. Barr, 919 F.3d 437, 451 (7th Cir. 2019) (Barrett, J., dissenting) (“[L]egislatures have the power to prohibit dangerous people from possessing guns.”), and our sister circuits have articulated the principle similarly in...
