Feds Are Arbitrarily Denying a Man’s Right to Own a Firearm

Denver, CO. – January 7, 2021 – Mountain States Legal Foundation’s (MSLF) Center to Keep and Bear Arms is asking the United States Supreme Court to hear the case of a Pennsylvania man who was denied the right to purchase a firearm because a fifteen-year-old misdemeanor DUI conviction. 

In 2016, Raymond Holloway Jr. of Pottstown, PA decided to purchase a firearm to keep in his home because he was concerned for his family’s safety and wanted to be able to protect both himself and his family. Yet, when Mr. Holloway underwent the federally required background check to make the purchase he was denied simply because he had been convicted of a misdemeanor driving under the influence charge in 2005, when he was still in his early twenties.  

In the many years since, Mr. Holloway has lived as a responsible and valuable member of his local community. He has worked as an educator and mentor for troubled youth for more than a decade. Yet the federal government continues to deny him his natural and fundamental right to keep and bear arms—a clear violation of the Second Amendment. 

Current federal law prohibits individuals that have been convicted of a crime punishable by imprisonment of a term exceeding one year from possessing firearms—for life.  The prohibition is not limited to those who commit violent crimes, felonies, or even those who were actually sentenced to more than one-year imprisonment. The law is so broad that it unconstitutionally prohibits non-violent individuals, like Mr. Holloway, from possessing firearms.   

To be clear, Mr. Holloway was only sentenced to 90 days confinement on work release in 2005.  No one was injured during his incident. And Mr. Holloway’s background check reflects no other criminal conviction other than his 2005 misdemeanor DUI.  

Mountain States Legal Foundation’s Center to Keep and Bear Arms has joined with the Cato Institute, the Reason Foundation, the Individual Rights Foundation, and Independence Institute to support Mr. Holloway’s petition to the Supreme Court to hear his case.  

“The federal government is arbitrarily denying Mr. Holloway his rights, along with an entire class of people like him,” said Director of MSLF’s Center to Keep and Bear Arms, Cody J. Wisniewski. “We are arguing that the court must restore to Mr. Holloway, and others like him, the natural and fundamental right to keep and bear arms, as guaranteed in the Constitution. Our Founders and Framers would never had stood for such a broad prohibition on non-violent Americans.” 

Read the filing here.

Read a case summary here.

Mountain States Legal Foundation, created in 1977, is a nonprofit, public-interest legal foundation dedicated to individual liberty, the right to own and use property, limited and ethical government, and the free enterprise system. Its offices are located outside Denver, Colorado.