Woah, how do they get from involuntary servitude for the punishment of a crime to loss of a fundamental right for life? By that rationale, it would also be Constitutional to permanently regulate what ex-felons say and where they go to church.
A friend of mine was helping represent a man here in North Carolina who had had his gun rights terminated due to a marijuana conviction from when he was 19. Never mind that he is in his 50s now and a successful, productive, and law-abiding member of society, and never mind that the crime he committed is today only a misdemeanor
I’ll have to check up on how that’s going. He was drafting the brief for the N.C. Supreme Court about a year ago.
If part of the statutory punishment for a particular crime would be that the defendant would for the next 500 years have to report to the government prior to publishing anything, and if a jury decided that such a punishment was appropriate given the defendant's actions, what would be the problem with it, especially if the crime was one that would have justified keeping the defendant in prison for 500 years and not letting him publish anything?
There is no justification for the present statutory scheme by which the federal government has decreed a federal lifetime ban on firearms possession by people who have convicted in state courts of crimes for which those state courts would not otherwise disarm them. On the other hand, I don't see that the Second Amendment would apply to parolees whose continued ability to walk around outside prison is contingent upon the will of the state. Such people could opt to remain in prison if they didn't want to walk around outside unarmed.