This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, February 22nd, 2023.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Last week the Third Circuit Court of Appeals heard the case of a man whose felony welfare fraud conviction meant he was no longer eligible to enjoy Second Amendment rights.

But where does that line of thinking end?

At least according to attorneys representing the government in that case, it doesn't have to.

Cato's Clark Neely, something of a Second Amendment litigator himself, is watching that case closely.

We spoke last week.

Yeah, so this case is called USV Range, R-A-N-G-E.

It involves a guy named Brian Range who pleaded guilty in 1995 to committing welfare fraud in the state of Pennsylvania because he and his wife who were in desperate need of food for their family

Neglected to report on the form the income that he earned from mowing yards and so then he

was convicted of a state-level felony and this makes him ineligible to own a handgun

under federal law because of a federal statute called 922G.

And so he is essentially challenging that federal law as applied to him.

What he's arguing is, look, I am a nonviolent,

you know, convict of a felony that wasn't,

you know, doesn't really, I don't

I don't present a risk to society.

And this blanket policy at the federal level

of disarming anybody who's been convicted

of any sort of a felony violates my Second Amendment right to own a gun and that's

the issue that's now before the Third Circuit Court of Appeals en banc

meaning the entire court because sitting as a panel like they usually do a

...