Gun Rights Restoration

By Elizabeth Franklin-Best, Esq., and Christopher Zoukis, JD, MBA

How do you get firearm rights restored after a federal conviction?

Four routes exist, and only two reach a federal conviction: a presidential pardon, and an application to the Attorney General for relief under 18 U.S.C. § 925(c) through the Department of Justice’s Federal Firearm Rights Restoration program, which opens to the public on November 4, 2026, capped at the first 5,000 applicants. Expungement or restoration of civil rights under § 921(a)(20) and state restoration reach only state convictions.

Key takeaways on gun rights restoration

• The federal disability comes from 18 U.S.C. § 922(g), which lists nine categories of prohibited persons — not just felons. Ammunition counts as much as a firearm.
• A state cannot fix a federal conviction. Beecham v. United States, 511 U.S. 368 (1994), holds that whether civil rights have been “restored” is governed by the law of the jurisdiction that convicted you. For a federal conviction, that is federal law.
• The § 925(c) application is real again. Applications open to invited candidates September 25, 2026; to the public — first 5,000 — on November 4, 2026; and to 500 more, with a $30 fee, on January 4, 2027.
• The Department says plainly that restoration is “neither automatic nor guaranteed.” It maintains presumptive disqualifiers, some permanent, and a denial for reasons other than a listed disqualifier creates a new five-year bar on reapplying.
• Relief now runs through the Office of the Pardon Attorney, not ATF. The 2025 interim final rule withdrew ATF’s delegation.
• Possessing a firearm or ammunition while prohibited is a federal felony carrying up to 15 years, and a 15-year mandatory minimum under the Armed Career Criminal Act if you have three qualifying priors.

What is the federal firearms disability, and who does it cover?

The federal firearms disability is the prohibition in 18 U.S.C. § 922(g) on shipping, transporting, possessing, or receiving any firearm or ammunition that has moved in interstate or foreign commerce. It is a status prohibition: it attaches to who you are, not to what you did with the gun. It is imposed by federal statute, applies nationwide, and — absent one of the routes described below — does not expire.

Nine categories of people are covered. Most published guidance discusses only the first.

The nine federal firearms disabilities under 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)

§ 922(g)	Prohibited person	The operative trigger	Notes that decide real cases
(g)(1)	Convicted of a crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year	The maximum available sentence, not the sentence imposed	A probation-only sentence still triggers it. Certain business/antitrust offenses and most state misdemeanors punishable by two years or less are carved out by § 921(a)(20)
(g)(2)	Fugitive from justice	Fleeing a jurisdiction to avoid prosecution or testimony	Status-based; ends when the status ends
(g)(3)	Unlawful user of, or addicted to, a controlled substance	Current unlawful use as defined by reference to 21 U.S.C. § 802	No conviction is required. State-legal marijuana remains unlawful use under federal law
(g)(4)	Adjudicated as a mental defective, or committed to a mental institution	A qualifying adjudication or involuntary commitment	Voluntary admission generally does not qualify; a qualifying state relief program can lift it
(g)(5)	Certain aliens — unlawfully present, or admitted on a nonimmigrant visa	Immigration status at the time of possession	Narrow statutory exceptions apply to some nonimmigrant visa holders
(g)(6)	Discharged from the Armed Forces under dishonorable conditions	The characterization of the discharge	A general or other-than-honorable discharge is not a dishonorable discharge
(g)(7)	Renounced United States citizenship	Formal renunciation under 8 U.S.C. § 1481	Rare, and it is the renunciation, not expatriation generally
(g)(8)	Subject to a qualifying domestic-violence restraining order	An order after notice and a hearing, containing either a credible-threat finding or an express force prohibition	Upheld as applied in United States v. Rahimi, 602 U.S. 680 (2024); lasts only as long as the order
(g)(9)	Convicted of a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence	A misdemeanor with force as an element, committed in a qualifying domestic relationship	A lifetime federal bar from a misdemeanor. See misdemeanor domestic violence gun rights restoration

Two features of that table cause more confusion than everything else on this topic combined.

First, “punishable by” does the work in (g)(1), not the sentence you served. The trigger is the statutory maximum for the offense of conviction. A defendant who received three years of probation on a federal offense carrying a five-year maximum is prohibited exactly as fully as one who served four years in a federal prison. Time served is irrelevant to whether the disability attached.

Second, ammunition is a firearm for this purpose. Section 922(g) prohibits possessing “any firearm or ammunition,” and § 921(a)(17)(A) defines ammunition to include “ammunition or cartridge cases, primers, bullets, or propellent powder designed for use in any firearm.” A single loose cartridge in a glovebox is a completed federal offense. This is the fact pattern that most often turns a person who thought they were being careful into a defendant.

The penalty is not nominal. A knowing violation of § 922(g) is punishable by up to 15 years under 18 U.S.C. § 924(a)(8) — Congress raised that ceiling from ten years in 2022, and a great deal of published guidance has not caught up. If the person has three prior convictions for a violent felony or a serious drug offense committed on different occasions, § 924(e) imposes a mandatory minimum of fifteen years, and the court “shall not suspend the sentence of, or grant a probationary sentence to” that defendant.

One narrowing rule matters on the other side of the ledger. Under Rehaif v. United States, 588 U.S. 225 (2019), the government must prove not only that the defendant knew he possessed the firearm but that “he knew he belonged to the relevant category of persons barred from possessing a firearm.” Knowledge of prohibited status is an element. What the statute never allows is a good-faith belief that the law permits possession; Rehaif addresses knowledge of status, not knowledge of the statute. For how these pieces fit together in an actual prosecution, see can a felon own a gun.

What are the four routes out of a federal firearms disability?

There are four, they are legally distinct, and merging them is the single most common error in published guidance on this subject. Two of them reach a federal conviction. Two of them do not.

Route	Legal authority	Who decides	What conviction it reaches	What it does to the federal firearms bar
Presidential pardon	U.S. Const. art. II, § 2, cl. 1; 28 C.F.R. pt. 1	The President, on a recommendation from the Attorney General	Federal offenses only. The President cannot pardon a state conviction	A full presidential pardon of the federal conviction removes the federal firearms disability flowing from that conviction
§ 925(c) relief (FFRR)	18 U.S.C. § 925(c); final rule, 91 Fed. Reg. 54054 (Aug. 20, 2026)	The Attorney General, through the Office of the Pardon Attorney	Any federal disability under § 922(g)(1)–(9), whatever its source	Removes the federal disability if granted. Does not touch state law
§ 921(a)(20) expungement, set-aside, pardon, or restoration of civil rights	18 U.S.C. § 921(a)(20)	The convicting jurisdiction	Practically, state convictions — see Beecham	The conviction “shall not be considered a conviction,” unless the relief expressly says firearms are still barred
State restoration	State constitutions and statutes; varies by state	A governor, a court, a clemency board, or automatically by law	State convictions in that state	Relevant to the federal bar only through § 921(a)(20), and only for that state’s conviction

Read that table together with one rule and the whole subject becomes tractable: the jurisdiction that convicted you is the jurisdiction that has to forgive you.

That is not a rule of thumb. It is the holding of Beecham v. United States, 511 U.S. 368 (1994). Section 921(a)(20) contains a choice-of-law clause — “What constitutes a conviction of such a crime shall be determined in accordance with the law of the jurisdiction in which the proceedings were held” — and the Supreme Court held that the clause governs the exemption clause that follows it. As the Court put it, “[a]sking whether a person has had civil rights restored is thus just one step in determining whether something should ‘be considered a conviction,'” and “[b]y the terms of the choice-of-law clause, this determination is governed by the law of the convicting jurisdiction.” The petitioners in Beecham, who had federal convictions and state restorations, lost: they “can take advantage of § 921(a)(20) only if they have had their civil rights restored under federal law.”

The practical consequence is blunt. A state pardon, a state expungement, a state certificate of restoration, and an automatic state restoration of civil rights do nothing at all for a federal conviction. People routinely spend years and real money obtaining state relief that cannot touch the problem they actually have. If your prohibiting conviction is federal, only a presidential pardon or § 925(c) relief will move it.

Route one: a presidential pardon

A presidential pardon is an exercise of the constitutional power in Article II, Section 2, Clause 1. It reaches federal offenses and only federal offenses. The Department of Justice states directly, in the Federal Firearm Rights Restoration program’s own FAQ, that “[a] full pardon granted by the president removes penalties and disabilities, including a firearm disability, resulting from the federal conviction” — with the qualification that if you have “a separate, independent basis for firearm prohibition, like a state conviction or a prohibiting status, you may need to seek federal firearms relief.”

That qualification matters more than it sounds. A pardon of your 2009 federal wire fraud conviction does nothing about your 2014 state assault conviction, your current unlawful drug use, or an active restraining order. The pardon removes one basis; every other basis stands on its own.

The procedural rules live in 28 C.F.R. Part 1. Two of them decide most timelines. Section 1.1 requires a formal petition addressed to the President and submitted to the Pardon Attorney. Section 1.2 provides that “[n]o petition for pardon should be filed until the expiration of a waiting period of at least five years after the date of the release of the petitioner from confinement or, in case no prison sentence was imposed, until the expiration of a period of at least five years after the date of the conviction,” and that “[g]enerally, no petition should be submitted by a person who is on probation, parole, or supervised release.”

Those regulations bind the Department’s own staff, not the President. Section 1.11 says so: the rules “are advisory only and for the internal guidance of Department of Justice personnel,” they “create no enforceable rights in persons applying for executive clemency,” and they do not “restrict the authority granted to the President under Article II, section 2.” Pardons are granted outside the regulatory pathway with some regularity, and the pathway itself creates no entitlement to anything.

The pardon route is covered in depth at what is a presidential pardon and, procedurally, at how to get a presidential pardon. What a pardon does and does not erase — a question people get wrong in both directions — is at what a pardon does not do.

Route two: § 925(c) relief and the DOJ Federal Firearm Rights Restoration program

This is the route that changed, and the reason this page exists.

18 U.S.C. § 925(c) has been on the books since 1968 and was broadened in 1986. It provides that a person prohibited from possessing firearms “may make application to the Attorney General for relief from the disabilities imposed by Federal laws,” and that the Attorney General “may grant such relief if it is established to his satisfaction that the circumstances regarding the disability, and the applicant’s record and reputation, are such that the applicant will not be likely to act in a manner dangerous to public safety and that the granting of the relief would not be contrary to the public interest.”

That standard has two independent halves — not likely to be dangerous and not contrary to the public interest — and an applicant must satisfy both.

The dates, and why the calendar is the whole strategy

The Department is opening the program in stages, and the public stage is capped.

Date	What opens	Who can apply	Fee
September 21, 2026	The final rule takes effect	—	—
September 25, 2026	Application opens to invited candidates only	Individuals the Department invites	None
November 4, 2026	Application opens to the public	The first 5,000 applicants, first come, first served	None
January 4, 2027	Application reopens	500 more applicants	$30, waiver or reduction available for indigency

The Department’s own explanation for the staging is that it is testing the platform: it will “open the application to the first 5,000 people to apply, on a first come, first served basis,” and the January phase “is intended to specifically test the effectiveness of our online payment portal to collect fees.” There is no published commitment to a fourth window or a date for general availability — only that “[o]nce the Department is confident of the effectiveness of our processes, we will ensure access to the public at large.”

Two operational facts follow, and both are the reason preparation cannot wait until November.

First, the application has a 30-day internal clock. Once you begin the e-application you have thirty days to complete and submit it; miss that and you start over. There is no recovery of a lost link and PIN.

Second, fingerprints come after you start. Electronic fingerprints must be obtained after you submit the first part of the e-application and receive a QR code by email, and then taken at a participating U.S. Post Office. That sequencing means the fingerprint step consumes part of your thirty days.

A person who begins assembling twenty-five years of criminal-history records, certified court documents, and character references on November 4 is unlikely to finish inside a thirty-day window that is running while the 5,000 slots fill. The step-by-step application — what the Department asks for, disability by disability, and how the presumptive-disqualifier tiers work — is covered at federal firearm rights restoration.

The standard, stated the way the Department states it

The Department has been unusually direct about the odds, and quoting it exactly is more useful than softening it:

“Under the final rule, restoration of firearm rights is neither automatic nor guaranteed. Each applicant must establish to the Attorney General’s satisfaction that the circumstances giving rise to the prohibition, together with the applicant’s record, reputation, and subsequent conduct, demonstrate that the applicant is not likely to act in a manner dangerous to public safety and that granting relief would not be contrary to the public interest.”

Layered on top of that standard is a structure of presumptive disqualifiers — categories in which an application “will be denied, absent extraordinary circumstances.” They are organized into five tiers: current status, permanent, ten-year, five-year, and reapplication. A permanent disqualifier attaches to a felony conviction involving conduct such as the death of another person, sexual offenses, human trafficking, kidnapping, intimate-partner or domestic violence, robbery, arson, carjacking, terrorism, or brandishing or discharging a firearm.

Anyone in a presumptively disqualified category may still apply — the Department is explicit that eligibility to apply and likelihood of success are different questions — but the application must carry the burden of showing extraordinary circumstances.

Why this route was dead for thirty years, and what changed

Section 925(c) did not disappear. It was defunded.

Beginning with the Treasury, Postal Service, and General Government Appropriations Act, 1993, Congress attached a rider to ATF’s annual appropriation barring the agency from using “funds appropriated herein . . . to investigate or act upon applications for relief from Federal firearms disabilities under 18 U.S.C. [§] 925(c).” The Supreme Court recited that history in United States v. Bean, 537 U.S. 71 (2002), and listed the rider’s re-enactment in every appropriations act from 1994 through 2002. It was renewed thereafter as well.

Bean closed the obvious workaround. Thomas Bean, whose application ATF had returned unprocessed because of the funding bar, asked a federal district court to decide his fitness itself. The Fifth Circuit let him. The Supreme Court reversed, holding that “[i]naction by ATF does not amount to a ‘denial’ within the meaning of § 925(c),” and that “an actual decision by ATF on an application is a prerequisite for judicial review.” The Court added that “the very use in § 925(c) of the word ‘review’ to describe a district court’s responsibility in this statutory scheme signifies that a district court cannot grant relief on its own, absent an antecedent actual denial by ATF.”

The result for three decades was a statutory right with no functioning mechanism: the agency could not act, and the courts could not act in its place.

Two administrative steps unwound it. In March 2025 the Department published an interim final rule, Withdrawing the Attorney General’s Delegation of Authority, 90 Fed. Reg. 13080 (Mar. 20, 2025), which withdrew ATF’s delegation to adjudicate § 925(c) applications along with the moribund regulations that had governed the ATF process. In August 2026 the Department published the final rule at 91 Fed. Reg. 54054 (Aug. 20, 2026), effective September 21, 2026, and announced the program. Adjudication now sits with the Office of the Pardon Attorney; the Department’s FAQ states flatly that ATF “no longer” administers the program and that “[a]ll applications for federal firearm rights restoration must be submitted through the Office of the Pardon Attorney.”

This is not hypothetical relief

Section 925(c) requires that whenever the Attorney General grants relief, he “shall promptly publish in the Federal Register notice of such action, together with the reasons therefor.” Those notices are being published. Four Granting of Relief; Federal Firearms Privileges notices have appeared since January 2025 — 90 Fed. Reg. 17835 (Apr. 29, 2025), 91 Fed. Reg. 8532 (Feb. 23, 2026), 91 Fed. Reg. 32094 (May 29, 2026), and 91 Fed. Reg. 55362 (Aug. 27, 2026). The August 2026 notice alone records relief granted to nine individuals on May 18 and August 5, 2026, and states that the Attorney General reviewed, for each, “the materials that each individual submitted seeking either a pardon or relief from Federal firearms disabilities.”

That last clause is worth pausing on. Grants have issued out of pardon files as well as out of firearms-relief files, before the application portal even opened.

Applied Insight — Elizabeth Franklin-Best, Esq., Principal Attorney: The published grant notices are the only window anyone has into how this standard is actually being applied, and they are thin — the statute requires the reasons to be published, and what has been published so far is the recitation of the statutory findings. Until a body of decisions accumulates, a § 925(c) application has to be built the way a clemency petition is built: as a complete, documented account of the offense, the intervening years, and the specific reasons the applicant is not the risk the statute is worried about. We do not build these on the assumption that a form will carry the argument.

Route three: expungement, set-aside, pardon, or restoration of civil rights under § 921(a)(20)

Section 921(a)(20) contains the exemption that does most of the work in state cases. Its operative sentence reads:

“Any conviction which has been expunged, or set aside or for which a person has been pardoned or has had civil rights restored shall not be considered a conviction for purposes of this chapter, unless such pardon, expungement, or restoration of civil rights expressly provides that the person may not ship, transport, possess, or receive firearms.”

Three Supreme Court decisions define the edges of that sentence, and each one has cost people their liberty.

The relief has to come from the convicting jurisdiction. Beecham, discussed above. The Court also noted why: pardons, expungements, and set-asides “are either always or almost always . . . done by the jurisdiction of conviction,” and “[t]hat several items in a list share an attribute counsels in favor of interpreting the other items as possessing that attribute as well.”

The “unless” clause is all or nothing. In Caron v. United States, 524 U.S. 308 (1998), Massachusetts had restored the petitioner’s civil rights but continued to bar him from carrying handguns outside the home while permitting rifles and shotguns. The Court held the conviction still counted — for everything. “Either the restorations forbade possession of ‘firearms’ and the convictions count for all purposes, or they did not and the convictions count not at all. The unless clause looks to the terms of the past restorations alone and does not refer to the weapons at issue in the present case.” A partial state restriction is a total federal disqualification.

Caron also settled a question that helps people: restoration “by operation of law rather than by pardon or the like” is enough. “Nothing in the text of § 921(a)(20) requires a case-by-case decision to restore civil rights to this particular offender.” Automatic state restoration counts, as long as it does not retain a firearms restriction.

You cannot have restored what you never lost. In Logan v. United States, 552 U.S. 23 (2007), the petitioner’s state misdemeanor convictions had never cost him his civil rights at all, and he argued he should be treated at least as well as someone whose rights were taken and given back. The Court disagreed: the exemption “does not cover the case of an offender who retained civil rights at all times, and whose legal status, postconviction, remained in all respects unaltered by any state dispensation.” Logan also fixes the content of the term: the civil rights that matter under § 921(a)(20) “are the rights to vote, hold office, and serve on a jury.”

One historical note, because it explains why the statute is drafted the way it is. In Dickerson v. New Banner Institute, Inc., 460 U.S. 103 (1983), the Court held that “[w]hether one has been ‘convicted’ within the language of the gun control statutes is necessarily . . . a question of federal, not state, law,” and that a state expunction did not lift the federal disability. Congress responded in 1986 by writing the choice-of-law clause into § 921(a)(20). Beecham records that response, observing that “in enacting the choice-of-law clause, legislators may have been simply responding to our decision in Dickerson v. New Banner Institute, Inc., 460 U.S. 103 (1983), which held that federal law rather than state law controls the definition of what constitutes a conviction.” Dickerson is therefore not the current rule on that point, and any page still citing it for the proposition that state relief is categorically irrelevant is citing superseded law.

Route four: state restoration, and its hard limit

For a state conviction, state law is where the answer lives — and only because § 921(a)(20) points there. States take four broad approaches: automatic restoration on completion of sentence; petition to a court; application to a governor or clemency board; and, in a few jurisdictions, no mechanism at all for certain offenses.

Two cautions apply everywhere. Under Caron, if the state’s restoration keeps any firearms restriction on the books, it buys nothing federally. And under Beecham, none of it reaches a federal conviction, no matter how complete the state relief is.

State-by-state mechanics — including which category each approach falls into and what a reader should actually check in their own state — are at how to get gun rights back after felony.

Which route fits which conviction?

The threshold question is not “how do I get my rights back.” It is “what, exactly, is prohibiting me.” People frequently have more than one prohibitor and pursue relief for the wrong one.

If your prohibiting basis is…	Presidential pardon	§ 925(c) relief	§ 921(a)(20) relief	State restoration
A federal felony conviction	Yes — reaches it directly	Yes	Only if the relief is federal (Beecham)	No
A state felony conviction	No — the President cannot pardon a state offense	Yes	Yes, if from that state and without a firearms carve-out	Yes, through § 921(a)(20)
A federal or state misdemeanor crime of domestic violence, § 922(g)(9)	Federal convictions only	Yes	Yes, on the terms of § 921(a)(33)(B)(ii)	For state convictions, through § 921(a)(33)
A § 922(g)(4) mental-health adjudication or commitment	No — there is no conviction to pardon	Yes, but the Department asks you to exhaust a qualifying state program first	Not applicable	A qualifying state relief program lifts it federally
Current unlawful drug use, § 922(g)(3)	No	It is a current-status presumptive disqualifier	Not applicable	Not applicable
An active DV restraining order, § 922(g)(8)	No	It is a current-status presumptive disqualifier	Not applicable	Not applicable
A dishonorable discharge, § 922(g)(6)	Reaches a court-martial conviction, not the discharge itself	Yes	Not applicable	Not applicable

Three of those rows repay a second look.

A status is not a conviction, and status-based bars end when the status ends. Sections 922(g)(2), (g)(3), (g)(5), and (g)(8) describe conditions, not judgments. Congress used the present tense for them and the present perfect for the conviction-based bars, a distinction the Supreme Court noted in Dickerson: “Congress carefully distinguished between present status and a past event.” A person whose only prohibitor was an expired restraining order is not prohibited today and does not need relief — although the Department treats an active order, or current unlawful drug use, as a current-status presumptive disqualifier that must resolve before an application can succeed.

Mental-health disabilities have their own federal answer. Under the NICS Improvement Amendments Act of 2007, a person who receives relief from a qualifying state, territorial, or federal relief-from-disabilities program is no longer prohibited under § 922(g)(4). The Department asks § 922(g)(4) applicants to exhaust that route first, and treats a pending or denied application to a program you were eligible for as a current-status presumptive disqualifier. It also publishes a list of jurisdictions that offer no such program — currently Arkansas, Montana, New Hampshire, Wyoming, American Samoa, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the Northern Mariana Islands — and confirms that residents there may apply federally without going through a state process that does not exist.

Federal relief is federal only. The final rule’s announcement states that “[a]ny relief granted under the rule removes only applicable federal firearms disabilities and does not override independent restrictions imposed by state law,” and the program page adds that FFRR “does not automatically restore state or tribal firearm rights.” A person with both a federal disability and a state one has two problems and needs two solutions.

Is there a fifth route — litigating the Second Amendment?

There is, and it is the one to be most careful about, because the law is unsettled and the venue determines the answer.

After New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1 (2022), a firearm regulation that burdens conduct covered by the Second Amendment’s plain text stands only if “the government . . . demonstrate[s] that the regulation is consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” United States v. Rahimi, 602 U.S. 680 (2024), applied that framework to § 922(g)(8) and upheld it: “When an individual has been found by a court to pose a credible threat to the physical safety of another, that individual may be temporarily disarmed consistent with the Second Amendment.” Rahimi also relaxed the analogical test — a regulation “need not be a ‘dead ringer’ or a ‘historical twin'” — and repeated Heller‘s statement that prohibitions on possession by “felons and the mentally ill” are “presumptively lawful.”

What Rahimi did not decide is whether § 922(g)(1) can constitutionally be applied to a particular non-violent offender. On that question two en banc courts of appeals have gone opposite ways.

In Range v. Attorney General, 124 F.4th 218 (3d Cir. 2024) (en banc), the Third Circuit held § 922(g)(1) unconstitutional as applied to a man whose disqualifying conviction was a 1995 guilty plea for making a false statement to obtain food stamps. The court held he “remains among ‘the people'” protected by the Second Amendment and that the government had not carried its historical burden — while stressing the limit: “Our decision today is a narrow one,” resting on the fact that “[t]he record contains no evidence that Range poses a physical danger to others.”

In United States v. Duarte, 137 F.4th 743 (9th Cir. 2025) (en banc), the Ninth Circuit reached the opposite result, writing: “Today, we align ourselves with the Fourth, Eighth, Tenth and Eleventh Circuits and hold that § 922(g)(1) is not unconstitutional as applied to non-violent felons like Steven Duarte.” Duarte agreed that felons are among “the people,” but held that the government’s historical showing carried the day at the second step, reasoning that “if the greater punishment of death and estate forfeiture was permissible to punish felons, then the lesser restriction of permanent disarmament is also permissible.”

So the same conviction can support a successful as-applied challenge in one circuit and a foreclosed one in another. That is a genuine split, not a drafting artifact, and the Supreme Court has not resolved it.

The practical point for someone deciding what to do is that the § 925(c) application and the constitutional challenge are not equivalent options. One is an administrative request with a published standard, a documented record, and a defined decisionmaker. The other is litigation with an uncertain outcome that depends on where you live. It is also worth noticing that Judge Krause, concurring in Range, read Rahimi to mean that the Second Amendment “demands that the disability [§ 922(g)(1)] imposes has at least the potential to be ‘of limited duration’ . . . and that a felon have a meaningful opportunity, after successfully serving his sentence, to show that the burden should be lifted based on individualized findings.” A functioning § 925(c) process is exactly such an opportunity — which is part of why its return matters beyond the individuals who use it.

What does a denial cost you?

More than a lost filing fee, and this is the least-discussed feature of the new program.

The Department’s published guidance ties the consequences of denial to its reason. If the denial rests on a permanent presumptive disqualifier, the applicant “will remain disqualified.” If it rests on a time-limited five- or ten-year presumption, the applicant should wait for that period to run. If it rests on a current status, the applicant should wait until the status changes. And if the denial is “for other reasons,” the applicant acquires “a 5-year presumptive disqualifier in addition to whatever your initial firearm disability was.”

That last rule is the one to plan around. A weak, incomplete, or premature application does not merely fail — it can add five years to the wall. Combined with the requirement to disclose every presumptive disqualifier, including convictions that were “expunged, pardoned, set aside, or similarly amended by a post-conviction event,” this is not an application to submit to see what happens.

Whether judicial review is available after a denial under the new process is an open question. Section 925(c) provides that a person “whose application for relief from disabilities is denied by the Attorney General may file a petition with the United States district court for the district in which he resides for a judicial review of such denial,” and that the court “may in its discretion admit additional evidence where failure to do so would result in a miscarriage of justice.” Bean held only that agency inaction under the funding bar was not a denial; it did not address review of an actual denial by the Attorney General under a functioning process. The honest answer is that this has not been litigated under the new rule, and anyone who tells you how a court will treat it is guessing.

Applied Insight — Christopher Zoukis, JD, MBA, Managing Director: The documentation burden is where these applications are won or lost, and it is heavier than people expect. Every applicant has to produce state criminal records covering twenty-five years or since age eighteen, whichever is shorter, for every place they have lived — plus the charging document, the judgment, and an official document proving the date the last requirement of the sentence was satisfied, restitution included. Where a record genuinely cannot be obtained, the Department accepts a sworn statement, but that statement has to recite what the missing document said and describe what you did to try to get it. Assembling that is a months-long project for most people. It is not something to begin the week the window opens.

What should you do before November 4, 2026?

Nothing about this program rewards waiting, and the cap makes that concrete. A realistic sequence:

1. Identify every prohibitor, not just the obvious one. Pull your own criminal history from the FBI and from the state police in every state you have lived in. The Department expects you to dispute errors with the originating agency before you apply, and that process takes time.
2. Determine whether your prohibiting conviction is federal or state, because that single fact eliminates two of the four routes. If it is federal, state relief is not an option, whatever anyone has told you.
3. Check yourself against the presumptive-disqualifier tiers honestly. If a permanent disqualifier applies, the question becomes whether extraordinary circumstances exist — a different and much harder case to build.
4. Order certified records now. Charging documents, judgments, plea agreements, presentence reports, and proof of sentence completion, from courts that are often slow and sometimes archived offsite.
5. Line up character references and, if a mental-health disability is involved, the current professional certification the Department requires.
6. Decide whether a pardon petition should run alongside, particularly given that published grants have issued out of pardon files. That is a strategic judgment about which door to knock on, and sometimes the answer is both.

Related reading on the four restoration routes

The four routes on this page are not interchangeable and, under Beecham v. United States, two of them are unavailable to anyone with a federal conviction. Work out which one applies to you before spending anything.

For the threshold question, can a felon own a gun. For the federal administrative route, federal firearm rights restoration. For the state analysis, the narrative version is the state guide to firearm rights restoration and the verified fifty-one-jurisdiction data set — possession statute, whether it reaches another sovereign’s conviction, offense carve-outs, and any restoration clause inside the statute — is at firearm rights restoration by state.

If the disability is a domestic-violence conviction rather than a felony, see misdemeanor domestic violence gun rights restoration. For the executive route, pardons lawyer, how to get a presidential pardon, and what a pardon does not do. To talk to someone about which route is open, firearm rights restoration attorney. And where the conviction itself may be vulnerable, a federal § 2255 motion or a writ of coram nobis is the better remedy, because a vacated conviction is not a conviction for § 922(g)(1) purposes at all.

Why work with Elizabeth Franklin-Best, P.C.

Elizabeth Franklin-Best, P.C. is a boutique federal criminal defense and appellate firm founded in 2019, running a national federal practice on an intentionally small caseload. Elizabeth Franklin-Best is admitted to the U.S. Supreme Court and twelve of the thirteen U.S. Courts of Appeals — every regional circuit (1st–11th) plus the D.C. Circuit — and has handled more than 330 federal proceedings, over 100 of them appeals, with sixteen published decisions as counsel of record. She is recognized by Best Lawyers in America 2026 for Appellate Practice and by Chambers USA 2026 for white-collar litigation, and was named South Carolina Public Defender of the Year in 2010.

Christopher Zoukis, JD, MBA, the firm’s Managing Director, is the author of the Federal Prison Handbook, the Directory of Federal Prisons, Prison Education Guide, and College for Convicts, and serves as Chairman of the Board of the Human Rights Defense Center. He earned his J.D. at the University of California, Davis School of Law after serving roughly a decade in the federal Bureau of Prisons, where he became an award-winning incarcerated journalist.

A firearms-disability matter is a records project and a persuasion project at the same time. It rewards the same discipline as a post-conviction filing: find every document, read the whole file, and put the decisionmaker in a position where the favorable conclusion is the obvious one. That is the work this firm does.

We serve clients nationwide from offices in Columbia and Mount Pleasant, South Carolina. No outcome can be promised, and nothing on this page is a prediction about any particular case.

Talk to us before the window opens

If you are trying to work out which of the four routes fits your conviction — or whether the November 4 window is realistic for your records — schedule a consultation or call (843) 620-1100.

Frequently Asked Questions About Gun Rights Restoration

Reviewed for legal accuracy by Elizabeth Franklin-Best, Esq., Principal Attorney·September 2026