Who Gets to Be a “Good Guy” with a Gun?

Hunting was Barney Britt’s passion. He once held a record in North Carolina for the third-largest deer ever taken. In 1979, at age twenty, Britt pleaded guilty to a drug felony. He served four months, completed probation, and, after a five-year statutory exclusion from firearm possession, had his gun rights restored in 1987. For seventeen years he hunted without incident. Then the legislature amended North Carolina’s Felony Firearms Act, N.C.G.S. § 14-415.1, to bar any person with a felony conviction from possessing a firearm, permanently. Britt turned over all his firearms, including his sporting rifles and shotguns, and then sued to have them restored. In 2009 the North Carolina Supreme Court held the statute unconstitutional—but only as applied to Britt. Emphasizing Britt’s years of lawful conduct, the court concluded that it was “unreasonable to assert that a nonviolent citizen who has responsibly, safely, and legally owned and used firearms for seventeen years is in reality so dangerous” as to justify a categorical ban. The law remained in place, but Britt—an economically stable white man who had proven himself a law-abiding citizen—regained his firearms.

Britt’s victory is both ordinary and exceptional. Ordinary, because courts and lawmakers have historically sorted Americans into those entitled to “keep and bear” firearms and those permanently excluded. It is also exceptional, because Britt’s race, resources, and record fit a story appellate judges could place on an arc of redemption. Most with felony convictions, even for nonviolent crimes, never receive a hearing before they are permanently prohibited from firearm ownership.

In 2022 the Supreme Court radically upended the firearm regulatory landscape with its decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen that, in general terms, challenged most state-level laws restricting firearm carry. But it did so by way of reference to the archetypical “law-abiding citizen” as gun owner, leading many states to feel justified in continuing to ban people convicted of felonies from legally possessing guns.

In what follows, we argue that in light of Bruen and other recent Supreme Court decisions expanding individual rights to “keep and bear” firearms for personal self-defense, the legal and ethical justifications for a categorical ban on “felons” have become indefensible.

Michelle Alexander coined the term “the New Jim Crow” to describe the contemporary, formally color-blind legal system that nonetheless reinforces a perpetual caste system. At the bottom are “felons,” stripped of civic and material rights even after they have served their sentence. Historically, those convicted of felonies are disproportionately low-income and over-policed; they are also less likely to be able to afford private representation. Once someone is convicted of a felony—defined as a crime punishable by more than a year of incarceration—the state may lawfully deny work, housing, education, jury service, voting, and, crucially, the right to “have and bear” firearms.

Despite its high exclusionary stakes, “there is no essential attribute or internal coherence to the category felony,” according to legal scholar Alice Ristroph. “It is a group defined from without rather than from within.” Felonies include nonviolent as well as violent crimes, and yet the label serves as a “formal legal designation” that excludes people from the rights, privileges, and protections of full citizenship. Infractions that count as felonies are also place specific: a crime deemed a felony in one jurisdiction may not be considered a felony in another. Given its categorical incoherence, “felon” operates as a stigmatizing label rather than an empirical assessment of a person’s actual dangerousness.

The categorical incoherence of criminalization has a long history that can’t be separated from the history of U.S. racial capitalism. Following the Civil War, the Thirteenth Amendment criminalized slavery, “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted,” thus opening the door to criminalization as a proxy for continued enslavement. And although the Fourteenth Amendment conferred citizenship on people born on U.S. soil, southern states resisted the expansion of civil and political rights to African Americans by passing “Black Codes.” These state-based laws undermined freed people’s access to the full rights and privileges of citizenship, including the right to “keep and bear” arms. For example, Louisiana and Mississippi laws prohibited African Americans from possessing firearms without written permission from white employers and/or local law enforcement. These laws codified racially excludable persons—whether defined as “freedmen,” “negroes,” or “mulattos”—rather than prohibiting types of weapons considered dangerous. The rhetorical sleight of hand designated all African Americans as potentially dangerous and therefore ineligible to own firearms. White lawmakers justified these exclusions based on racist appeals to public (white) protection and by designating African American freedom as a threat to white property and safety.

Even as Black Codes were formally repealed, along with their explicit racial exclusions, they transformed into widespread Jim Crow laws that normalized racial segregation based on the myth that public accommodations could be “separate but equal.” While new firearm regulations lacked overt appeals to race, they contained procedural constraints that would disproportionately encumber African Americans. For example, New York’s 1911 Sullivan Law became a model for twentieth-century firearm regulation nationwide, requiring people to apply to police for concealed carry licenses or risk felony charges for unauthorized gun carry. Although the law itself contained no mention of race or color, majority white law enforcement would serve as a bulwark of racialized gatekeeping.

Against the backdrop of Jim Crow, the National Firearms Act (1934) became the first federal effort to regulate the ownership and use of firearms. The act prohibited weapons associated with organized crime, including “gangster weapons” like machine guns, silencers, sawed-off shotguns, and other short-barreled firearms. While this legislation referenced “gangsters” involved in organized crime, the legislation’s primary focus was on regulating types of weapons, rather than the people who used them.

In 1968, four years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, Congress shifted back from regulating guns to people. The Gun Control Act (GCA) created federal classes of “prohibited persons,” including drug users, people deemed mentally “defective,” and felons. Defined not by the nature and intensity of the crime, but rather by the length of the punishment, the felon-based prohibition reinforced the fiction that such a policy protects public safety. The GCA claimed to support “law enforcement officials in their fight against crime and violence” while promising not to impose “undue or unnecessary” burdens on “law-abiding citizens.” Immediately following the formal end of Jim Crow, federal gun governance codified its project of sorting people into varying, hierarchical categories of citizenship, with the armed, “law-abiding citizen” at the top and the permanently excludable “felon” at the bottom. And given the vast over-policing of Black communities—and the rise of facially race-neutral policy interventions like the “War on Drugs,” “stop and frisk,” “broken window” policing, zero-tolerance, and “three strikes” laws—Black Americans were vastly overrepresented in the ranks of “felons.”

The line separating law-abiding gun owners from dangerous, or potentially dangerous, felons solidified as contemporary constitutional interpretations embraced a more expansive, individualist understanding of the right to “have and bear” firearms. In District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), the Supreme Court affirmed an individual right to keep firearms for self-defense in the home, while reaffirming “longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill.” Individual armed self-defense was now understood as a constitutional right, but in the same stroke the Court affirmed two stigmatized categories as the excludable outside of “law-abiding” gun ownership.

This dichotomy between law-abiding people whose access to guns for self-protection receives constitutional protection and those excluded from that right further congealed in Bruen (2022). Again the Supreme Court fortified the ideal armed individuals, the “law-abiding, responsible citizens,” with an unquestioned right to carry firearms in public for personal self-defense, even as lower courts grapple with what, precisely, counts as longstanding or historical limits on possession by people with criminal records. In United States v. Rahimi (2024) the Court upheld the federal prohibition on gun possession by individuals subject to domestic-violence restraining orders, again emphasizing that the Second Amendment tolerates disarming people deemed dangerous. By implication, the decision reaffirmed the permanent exclusion of particular classes of people from the category of “law-abiding citizen.”

The figure of the armed citizen—wielding his gun in virtuous self-defense—has taken hold in the public imagination, despite a multitude of empirical studies indicating that firearms are overwhelmingly used offensively or self-destructively. The law-abiding armed citizen is increasingly defined by what it is not, that is, the threatening “bad guy” or criminal. After all, quipped National Rifle Association frontman Wayne LaPierre following the brutal massacre of twenty-six individuals—most of them children—at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in December 2012, “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” This battle cry against firearm regulation rests on an emotional appeal to heroic armed citizens as protectors of the innocent from armed and dangerous strangers.

While popular “gun rights” discourse promotes a tidy divide between armed “bad guy” criminals and “law-abiding good guys” with guns, the data tell a different story. The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) finds that firearm misuse is not characteristic of felons generally but rather concentrated among a smaller subset of people convicted of violent crimes. A BJS study found that firearm use was rare among people convicted of nonviolent crimes, with fewer than 2 percent reporting firing a gun during their offense. When firearms were used, handguns were most common, and they were typically obtained through informal or illegal sources such as friends, family, or street markets, rather than from licensed dealers subject to National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) surveillance.

In contrast, most mass shootings are perpetrated by (disproportionately white) men who obtained their weapons legally. The National Institute of Justice (NIJ) analyzed public mass shootings over a fifty-year period, confirming that most perpetrators were “law-abiding” gun owners until they turned their legally acquired guns on concert goers, religious congregations, grocery shoppers, and school children. Further, the NIJ analysis notes that most mass shooters were not legally prohibited from firearm ownership at the time of the offense and were more commonly characterized by situational stressors, grievances, and insider access to target locations rather than prior felony convictions. The study suggests that, while firearms are disproportionately involved in violent offenses, gun violence—particularly public mass murder—is not perpetrated by the archetypal “bad guy,” the felon permanently excluded from lawful firearm possession.

Proponents of blanket felony-based gun bans usually point to recidivism and a belief that “felons” are more likely to reoffend and to commit violent crimes than are non-felons. Courts often cite a 2002 Bureau of Justice Statistics study of people released from prison in 1994: 67.5 percent were rearrested within three years, and the cohort’s arrest rate for homicide was “53 times” the national average. A 2019 U.S. Sentencing Commission report found higher rearrest rates for people with violent priors. While these data have bolstered opinions upholding the federal statute (18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(1)) prohibiting felons from possessing firearms, they are not accurate measures of innate criminality or dangerousness. Arrest risk, and hence recidivism, is mediated by policing patterns, surveillance techniques, and reentry barriers that disproportionately burden low-income and over-policed communities. Among other problems with this data, “recidivism” rates conflate technical violations, such as missing a parole meeting, with violent offenses, reflecting people’s disproportionate exposure to the carceral state rather than their individual conduct.

Instead of safeguarding public safety, modern felony-based firearm prohibitions are rooted in historical systems of racial and class exclusion, whereby expansive criminalization and discretionary enforcement disproportionately label poor and minority individuals as “felons”. Most people so labeled permanently lose the right to bear arms without any individualized assessment of actual risk for violent behavior. In this light, the “felon” operates as an ostensibly neutral legal status that rationalizes permanent exclusion by interpreting structural disadvantage as personal dangerousness.

The story of Barney Britt with which we opened shows how white masculinity, time, and an exonerating narrative can lead to the restoration of rights. But most people cannot count on that exonerating arc. Anthony Lee Jackson, a thirty-six-year-old Black Alabaman was arrested in 2022 after a ShotSpotter alert summoned police to a location in Mobile on suspicion of gunshots. There, they found Jackson, who was surprised when police arrived just as he was saying goodbye to his girlfriend in her driveway. Jackson admitted to police that he had tested a gun by firing into the ground, and that he had two firearms in his car and one in his pocket. Police then arrested Jackson for illegal possession due to prior convictions. Both, like Britt’s, were nonviolent offenses: one drug-related offense and one for receiving stolen property.

Like many defendants after Bruen, Jackson argued that a categorical ban on “felons” lacks a requisite historical analogue. Jackson’s defense attorney, Colin Fitzpatrick, pointed out the lack of “historical tradition of stripping such a person of their individual right to bear arms as codified by the Second Amendment.” Having lost family members and friends to violence, Jackson claimed he had acquired firearms for self-defense. Fitzpatrick also argued that “Mr. Jackson is a non-violent, loyal, American citizen who has completed all aspects of his criminal sanction.”

Prosecutors countered that Heller affirmed the validity of the felony exclusion in the Gun Control Act of 1968. In September 2023, after his constitutional challenge failed, Jackson pleaded guilty to two counts of being a “felon in possession.” His story sits at the intersection of surveillance technology, racialized enforcement, and courts’ reflexive deference to the felon category. Jackson’s attorney explained, “Anthony cannot take the same steps for protection as his neighbors do, and it is difficult for Anthony to feel safe and as a convicted felon.”

Across stories like Jackson’s, the throughline is not danger but credibility: like Britt decades earlier, Jackson was charged and punished for nonviolent crimes that nevertheless led to his permanent categorization as a “felon.” But unlike Britt—whose gun rights were restored based on his years of law-abiding citizenship—Jackson remained frozen in his categorical exclusion. One man’s right to recreational access to rifles for hunting stands in stark contrast to the other’s permanent exclusion from the right “to possess an ordinary type of weapon and use it for lawful, historically established situations such as self-defense in a home.” Despite the Supreme Court’s affirmation of an individual right to keep firearms for self-defense—Jackson’s claims to the core rights and protections of law-abiding citizenship—fell on deaf ears.

Even as blanket felon exclusions police the boundary of who may be armed, the nation’s steady embrace of armed self-defense selectively expands the spaces where armed force is justified, even encouraged. Three years before Heller, a widespread legislative movement—starting with Florida—pushed the passage of state “Stand Your Ground” (SYG) laws, which remove the duty to retreat in any place a person may legally be. Since 2005 over half of U.S. states have adopted rules that encourage and justify armed self-defense as a privilege of law-abiding citizenship. Despite their facial neutrality, the laws evince significant racial and gender disparities in who really holds the right to defend themselves from a credible threat. A rigorous Urban Institute analysis of FBI data found that in SYG states, white-on-Black killings were ten times more likely to be deemed justified than Black-on-white killings.

Here the exclusion becomes most perverse: the further states move toward legalizing armed preemption by removing the duty to retreat, deregulating firearm ownership, and broadening immunity for those who claim to have shot and killed others in self-defense, the more the label “felon” ensures that the people most often exposed to violence are least able to defend themselves without risking more prison time. Jackson claimed that his need for a firearm stemmed from his lack of safety in his Mobile neighborhood, where several of his close friends had died by gunfire. Most courts categorically exclude felons from the right to “stand their ground,” since the laws of self-defense dictate that the self-defender must be law-abiding. Outcomes vary case by case, but the structural message is clear: armed citizenship presumes “law-abiding” eligibility, which is legally denied to the very populations who are most likely to be targeted by violence, surveillance, and criminalization.

Florida remains a laboratory for exclusionary armed citizenship and legalized violence. In September 2025 the state’s First District Court of Appeal declared the decades-old ban on open carry unconstitutional; the state’s attorney general promptly announced that open carry is now “the law of the state,” sowing confusion among agencies but marking a dramatic public-carry expansion. (Guns are still excluded from “sensitive places,” such as schools and courthouses.) This comes on top of Florida’s 2023 implementation of permitless carry. For people with felony records, the state’s call to armed citizenship is potentially lethal: more guns circulating visibly, with fewer off-ramps in confrontations, and no lawful pathway to bear arms, even where the state now invites “law-abiding citizens” to do so openly.

Despite insistence that categorical bans are designed to protect public safety, actual assessments of “risk” and public dangerousness are administratively constructed, expanded or contracted according to political incentive rather than public-health logic and empirical evidence.

The categorical felon-in-possession model fails an ethical test on at least three fronts.

First, it collapses a person into a stigmatized label. “Felon” is not a criminological destiny; it is a legal status often triggered by nonviolent, plea-bargained, or decades-old conduct. To insist that the label permanently tracks dangerousness, while ignoring the structural drivers of both criminalization and “recidivism,” is to convert stigma into legal exception.

Second, it distributes risk along racialized lines. The same system that disproportionately sweeps Black and Latino people into felony status, then cites their rearrest rates as proof of dangerousness, perpetuates injustice. Meanwhile, “law-abiding” gun culture—including the mythology that guns are tools of self-defense—relies on the fiction of white masculine responsibility, emphasizing the rights of hunters and suburban property-defenders whose self-defense claims are more likely to be considered reasonable. The trope of armed citizenship intensifies the process of sorting and exclusion by converting defensive gun use into a legal fetish, celebrated for socially empowered individuals but criminalized for those who most need protection. Stand Your Ground laws selectively expand the zone where lethal force is justified or excused, even as empirical scholarship shows racial and gender disparities in whose force is deemed “reasonable.”

Third, it excludes criminalized populations from armed citizenship in spaces where the state cannot or will not protect them from actual violence. If the Second Amendment enshrines an individual right to armed self-defense, then permanent disarmament for old nonviolent offenses is hard to justify where the risk environment is high and public protection elusive. When a person with a felony record faces imminent danger, the “common law defenses of necessity” doctrine makes self-defense a legal minefield: pick up the gun and survive, risk new charges; don’t, and risk death.

A decarceral approach moves us beyond what Michelle Alexander calls “governance by exclusion” and toward harm reduction, addressing both interpersonal gun violence and the violence of criminalization. We might start by disaggregating the category of “felon,” given its arbitrary legal grounding, ethical incoherence, and pernicious impact on socially and economically vulnerable populations. Nonviolent, decades-old convictions must not trigger a lifetime exclusion from constitutionally protected rights. If the state insists on exclusions, they should be time-limited, individualized, and accompanied by a restoration process with clear criteria. Britt’s successful application for the restoration of his rights—based on years of law-abiding, nonviolent behavior—should be the baseline for all nonviolent offenders, not the exception.

Crucially, we must invest in the conditions that decrease violence—such as stable housing, credible-messenger intervention, trauma services, and non-police crisis response teams—rather than leaning on carceral, stigmatizing shortcuts whose benefits are unproven and whose harms are well documented. Restore the duty to retreat where it is safe to do so, and eliminate civil and criminal immunities that have been shown to intensify racially unequal outcomes. In spite of supporters’ claims that Stand Your Ground laws allow “law-abiding citizens” to defend themselves from threatening criminals, the best empirical syntheses link the laws to increased homicides with no credible public safety gains. Background-check systems must be accurate, transparent, and oriented around due process, not ad hoc expansions or purges that reflect political cycles more than public safety.

The Second Amendment’s modern jurisprudence repeatedly invokes “law-abiding, responsible citizens.” But “law-abiding” is not a neutral descriptor; it is a boundary the state draws and redraws to decide whose fear counts and whose doesn’t, whose life merits armed protection and whose is presumptively suspect. Felon-in-possession laws, as currently structured, launder that nebulous boundary into common sense. They convert a racialized label into permanent civic exile; they withhold self-defense in precisely the places where the state has concentrated risk. Further, they coexist with policy choices—like Stand Your Ground and permitless carry—that amplify the risk of lethal encounters in which firearms become a first, rather than the last, resort.

Britt had his gun rights restored because he was socially legible as a “good guy,” a “law-abiding citizen” rather than a “criminal bad guy.” By contrast, Jackson’s defense—his professed need for guns as protection against a violent social landscape—became proof of his permanent culpability.

A truly public-safety-centered policy would invert this logic, questioning blanket exclusions based on antiquated labels and probing their actual impact. For nonviolent offenders, the categorical exclusion—based not on actual dangerousness but on arbitrary and site-specific legal policies—increases harm by forcing people into desperate, criminalized self-help while selectively providing guns and legal immunity to those who fit the hazy form of the “good guy.” It would treat citizenship not as a prize bestowed on the few but as a platform of equal care, conferring safety through repair, not through permanent exclusion. Until then, “law-abiding citizen” remains less a description than a verdict, and “felon” less a measure of danger than a means by which to distribute it.

_{Image source: Tsvetoslav Hristov / Unsplash}

Contributors

Caroline Light Caroline Light is author of Stand Your Ground: A History of America’s Love Affair with Lethal Self-Defense and That Pride of Race and Character: the Roots of Jewish Benevolence in the Jim Crow South. She is Senior Lecturer and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Harvard.

Janae Thomas Janae Thomas, Ph.D., Esq., is a licensed attorney in Florida, Texas, New York, and Washington, D.C. She earned her Ph.D. in Politics and International Affairs from the University of South Florida in 2023. Her research focuses on Stand Your Ground laws. In addition to her academic work, she serves as an associate attorney at Quintairos, Prieto, Wood & Boyer and as a professor of American Government at Hillsborough College.

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• Law & Policy

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• guns
• legal history
• racism
• supreme court