The National Rifle Association, Firearms Policy Coalition and Second Amendment Foundation filed a joint amicus brief on October 1 asking the U.S. Supreme Court to hear Johnson v. United States. The case concerns whether a person whose only disqualifying felony was nonviolent may bring an as-applied Second Amendment challenge to the federal lifetime firearm prohibition. The filing supports review; it is not a ruling, and the Court has not agreed to hear the case.
The Supreme Court docket identifies the case as No. 26-270 and shows that it was docketed September 1. Joseph Frederick Johnson filed his petition on August 27 after the Tenth Circuit affirmed his convictions. The lower-court case was No. 25-5159, and the Tenth Circuit entered its decision on April 29. The federal government waived its right to respond on September 18.
Johnson's conviction and challenge
The certiorari petition says Johnson's sole predicate felony was a 2015 Colorado conviction for marijuana cultivation. According to the petition, that conviction resulted in probation rather than imprisonment, and the probation ended early. A federal grand jury later indicted him in December 2024 on two counts of possessing a firearm and ammunition as a felon. Those charges arose from separate police encounters described as a traffic stop and a welfare check.
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Johnson pleaded guilty to both federal counts while preserving his right to appeal the denial of his motion to dismiss. The district court sentenced him to 12 months and one day in prison, followed by three years of supervised release. His challenge targets 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(1), which covers a person previously convicted of a crime punishable by more than one year in prison. He is not asking the Supreme Court to erase his conviction at this stage; his petition asks whether the Tenth Circuit must permit an individualized constitutional challenge.
The Tenth Circuit held that its precedent foreclosed Johnson's claim without regard to the nonviolent nature of his earlier offense. His petition says nine federal circuits have addressed the broader issue and describes a 6-3 split. It identifies the Third, Fifth and Sixth Circuits as allowing some as-applied challenges, while the Second, Fourth, Eighth, Ninth, Tenth and Eleventh Circuits categorically bar them. That split matters practically because the same type of predicate conviction can receive different Second Amendment treatment depending on where a federal case is brought.
What the groups argue
The October 1 amicus brief argues that the Supreme Court's historical-tradition test applies even to firearm regulations that District of Columbia v. Heller called presumptively lawful. The groups contend that some courts have effectively treated that wording as conclusively lawful and have refused to examine challenges based on a person's circumstances. They ask the Court to grant review and clarify whether the historical basis for felon-dispossession laws is a tradition of disarming dangerous people rather than every person ever convicted of a felony.
The brief's historical claim is advocacy, not a judicial finding. It surveys colonial restrictions, Revolutionary War measures, ratification-era proposals, nineteenth-century laws and militia requirements. The groups say the examples targeted people viewed as dangerous, disaffected or likely to commit violence. They also point to laws protecting militia arms from debt collection and argue that early militia statutes did not exempt men merely because they had completed a criminal sentence. The United States has not filed a merits response contesting that history in this docket.
For firearm owners with old nonviolent convictions, the immediate rule has not changed. Section 922(g)(1) remains enforceable, Johnson's convictions remain in place, and the amicus filing creates no new permission to possess firearms. Even a grant of certiorari would only place the question before the justices. The petition itself frames the requested ruling narrowly: allow an as-applied challenge, rather than decide now which offenses or individual histories ultimately make permanent disarmament unconstitutional.
Conference set for October 9
The docket says the petition was distributed on September 23 for the Court's October 9 conference. It also records two October 1 amicus filings, one from the three gun-rights organizations and another from the Cato Institute. The next procedural milestone is the conference, after which the Court could grant review, deny the petition, seek a response despite the government's waiver, or take no immediately reported action. Until the Court issues an order, whether the justices will hear Johnson's challenge remains unresolved.
About the Author
Nick Sawinyh - Nick Sawinyh is a father, husband, hobby farmer, and gun enthusiast from Kentucky. He founded GunsNation and writes most of what appears on this blog.
