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Amy Coney Barrett's Second Amendment position

She's on the short list for the Supreme Court position, and she's very, VERY solid on the Second Amendment! She dissented in Kanter v. Barr, where the Seventh Circuit rejected an as-applied Second Amendment challenge, brought by a person who had been convicted of a nonviolent felony (mail fraud).

"History is consistent with common sense: it demonstrates that legislatures have the power to prohibit dangerous people from possessing guns. But that power extends only to people who are dangerous. Founding-era legislatures did not strip felons of the right to bear arms simply because of their status as felons. Nor have the parties introduced any evidence that founding-era legislatures imposed virtue-based restrictions on the right; such restrictions applied to civic rights like voting and jury service, not to individual rights like the right to possess a gun. In 1791--and for well more than a century afterward--legislatures disqualified categories of people from the right to bear arms only when they judged that doing so was necessary to protect the public safety."

"As I explain below, none of these rationales supports the proposition that the legislature can permanently deprive felons of the right to possess arms simply because of their status as felons. The historical evidence does, however, support a different proposition: that the legislature may disarm those who have demonstrated a proclivity for violence or whose possession of guns would otherwise threaten the public safety. This is a category simultaneously broader and narrower than "felons"--it includes dangerous people who have not been convicted of felonies but not felons lacking indicia of dangerousness."

"To be sure, the American experience does not map on exactly to the English one. For one thing, the right protected by the Second Amendment was decidedly broader than the one protected in the English Bill of Rights."

"In sum, the available evidence suggests that the right to arms differs from rights that depend on civic virtue for enjoyment. The Second Amendment confers an individual right, intimately connected with the natural right of self-defense, and not limited to civic participation (i.e., militia service)."

"If the Second Amendment were subject to a virtue limitation, there would be no need for the government to produce--or for the court to assess--evidence that nonviolent felons have a propensity for dangerous behavior. But Heller forecloses the "civic right" argument on which a virtue limitation depends. And while both Wisconsin and the United States have an unquestionably strong interest in protecting the public from gun violence, they have failed to show, by either logic or data, cf. Skoien , 614 F.3d at 642, that disarming Kanter substantially advances that interest. On this record, holding that the ban is constitutional as applied to Kanter does not "put[ ] the government through its paces," see Williams , 616 F.3d at 692, but instead treats the Second Amendment as a "second-class right, subject to an entirely different body of rules than the other Bill of Rights guarantees," McDonald v. City of Chicago , 561 U.S. 742, 780, 130 S.Ct. 3020, 177 L.Ed.2d 894 (2010) (plurality opinion). I therefore dissent."