Background: Chicago skyline. (AP Photo/Kamil Krzaczynski) Inset: Glen Price booking photo (via Cook County Jail).
In a ruling that seems fated to find its way before the U.S. Supreme Court, a judge in Illinois has recently found that the gun rights of a felon convicted of multiple armed robberies are protected by the Second Amendment.
The finding from U.S. District Judge Robert Gettleman was issued on Nov. 2 and stems from a case involving Illinois resident Glen Price. Price, 37, allegedly brandished a gun and robbed someone on a train in September 2021. Police said he stole a cellphone and a train fare card too. When police arrested him, they found a 9 mm gun in his possession, cocaine, ammunition and a stolen credit card.
Price was charged with unlawful possession of a firearm since he already had a criminal record featuring no less than three felony convictions for armed robbery and one conviction for aggravated battery of a police officer.
Until Gettleman’s ruling on Nov. 2, Price was facing 15 years in prison for his latest offense — the mandatory minimum sentence when convicted. But Gettleman, appointed by former President Bill Clinton, relied on a recent ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen that took him in this controversial direction.
Under Bruen, the high court struck down a more than century-old law in New York that required “proper cause” to carry a concealed firearm. The 6-3 decision reversed a lower court ruling and rocked more than a dozen state and federal laws around the country, according to analysis this July published in Politico. It also drew condemnation from President Joe Biden who said he was disappointed with the ruling given the steady increase of gun violence in the U.S.
It went against “common sense,” Biden said.
“Although there are strong policy reasons for doing everything possible to keep guns off our streets and out of our communities, this court can find no such historical analogue,” Gettleman wrote.
Bruen, the judge reasoned, required courts to deem whether a statute dispossessing someone of their right to own a gun posed a “comparable burden” on the right to bear arms itself.
The judge wrote:
“Although the historical record … demonstrates this nation’s tradition of ‘comparably justified’ categorical dispossession statutes, the government has failed to meet its burden of providing evidence of a dispossession statute with a ‘comparable burden’ to § 922(g)(1). Specifically, this court is not persuaded that the government has met its burden to show a ‘distinctly similar or even a relevantly similar’ historical analogue to 922(g)(1)’s permanent prohibition on firearm possession by felons which can only be lifted by expungement, federal pardon or other method of restoring civil rights that lifts the underlying offense from a conviction …”
By failing to provide felons with any means to repair their lost gun rights, there is a “far greater burden on the right to keep and bear arms,” Gettleman found, “than the historical categorical exclusions from the people’s Second Amendment rights.”
“The government has not demonstrated why the modern ubiquity of gun violence, and the heightened lethality of today’s firearm technology compared to the Founding, justify a different result. This nation’s gun violence problem is devastating, but does not change this result under Bruen which this court finds rests on the severity of § 922(g)(1) rather than its categorical prohibition,” he wrote.
In Price’s case, he found, removing his right to have a gun was a greater offense than when colonists in 1791 had their guns seized from them when they would not pass loyalty tests. Such tests would be barred under the First and Fourteenth Amendment today, he noted.
Gettleman said he searched case law all the way back to 1677, scanning for precedent on the prohibition but claimed to have located just one: a law in Rhode Island which “allowed the confiscation of guns owned by Native Americans if they did not have the necessary ‘ticket or order.””
State legislatures usually barred the sale of firearms to Native Americans, the judge highlighted, not possession itself.
Quoting from a 2023 decision in Range v. Attorney General of the U.S., a “lifetime of disarmament is not rooted in our Nation’s history and tradition,” he wrote.
In a report on the ruling Thursday from ABC affiliate WJLA, Richard Pearson, executive director of the Illinois State Rife Association, told the outlet that even he was opposed to the idea of violent convicted criminals being able to get a handgun or a conceal carry permit.
U.S. attorneys have already appealed, according to court records obtained by Law&Crime.
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