(Image via Getty)
For the first time ever, a former U.S. president was convicted of a crime. Twelve jurors found Donald Trump guilty of 34 felony counts beyond a reasonable doubt.
Naturally, since Trump’s conviction, people have been vociferously curious about what this all means. Can he still run for president? That one’s pretty straightforward: yes. Can he still vote given that most states restrict the voting rights of convicted felons? Probably, as long as he stays out of prison until November. Will this actually have any impact on the outcome of the upcoming presidential election? TBD.
While we will all have a lot of unanswered questions as the agonizingly slow wheels of justice grind, one impact of Trump’s felon status is crystal clear. As a convicted felon, Trump is legally prohibited from possessing a firearm.
Trump has claimed to be a gun owner on several occasions. In the wake of the deadly 2016 terror attacks in Paris, Trump told a French magazine, “I always carry a weapon on me,” and bragged that had he been there, he would have opened fire on the assailants. Trump claimed to have a concealed-carry permit and to own a .45 caliber H&K pistol as well as a .38 caliber Smith & Wesson.
Of course, Trump is a pathological liar who has long courted the gun-nut vote, so it is difficult to ascertain whether he is telling the truth about his guns. Records of who has a concealed-carry permit are not available to the public. Despite probably being the most photographed person in the world, no one seems to have a real photograph of Trump firing a gun (on the other hand, lots of pictures exist of me firing a gun despite being a quite infrequently photographed person).
Also, the guns Trump claims to own sort of sound like the types of guns someone who didn’t know much about guns would lie about owning. Well before he ran for president the first time, while defending his sons’ big game hunting in Africa, Trump himself said of an interest in guns and hunting “it’s not me” and “I just don’t really get it.”
Assuming Trump was not lying about owning guns in the first place so as to please easily duped NRA members, as a convicted felon, he must surrender his firearms. It is illegal for a felon to possess firearms or ammunition under both federal and state law. Keep in mind that “possession” is a much broader legal concept than is “ownership,” meaning that your average felon can’t even be in the same household as a gun that is theoretically owned by someone else.
The few news outlets which have reported on this niche aspect of Trump’s felonious status have noted that he may surrender his firearms at a local police precinct. In the real world, that almost never happens.
Your run-of-the-mill convicted felon, if he or she takes any action at all with respect to household firearms, will legally and physically transfer ownership to an adult family member who lives in a separate household. Donald Trump certainly has options in that department, including his sons Don and Eric, who are both, despite their many other evident character flaws, safe and experienced handlers of firearms.
It’s not as though law enforcement comes and tosses your house as soon as you’re convicted of a felony to make sure you give up your guns though. Newly minted felons might get an admonishment from the judge to make sure to get rid of their firearms, but that’s about the extent of immediate enforcement of the ban on felons in possession of firearms. When people get caught violating these laws, it is typically much later when they are caught with a firearm during the commission of some other crime, or when an aggrieved neighbor who sees them deer hunting in the fall eventually decides to make a report to law enforcement.
Now that he is a convicted felon, Trump has many good, easy options available to ensure he is not illegally in possession of a firearm. If he was not lying about owning guns in the first place, he doesn’t even seem like he would be that loath to give them up, as Trump has never, outside of obviously performative speeches at NRA rallies, been a very enthusiastic gun owner. His political rhetoric on gun rights has always been strong, yet his actual record places him among the most pro-gun-control presidents in modern history.
All that being said, Trump is the guy who kept nuclear secrets and other highly classified documents which were illegal to possess scattered haphazardly around his residence. He forced the FBI to raid Mar-a-Lago rather than simply return them, and then still hung on to multiple more sets of classified documents long after he’d instructed his lawyers to swear under oath that all the classified documents had been returned. Given that Trump does not have the greatest track record when it comes to turning things over that it is illegal for him to possess, I wouldn’t hold my breath on him giving up his guns now that he’s a convicted felon.
Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.
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