Stein urges top NC court to uphold law against felons owning guns

Gov. Josh Stein is asking the North Carolina Supreme Court to uphold a state law banning gun possession by felons. Stein’s lawyers filed a court document Monday seeking to file a friend-of-the-court brief in the case State v. Ducker.

The North Carolina Conference of District Attorneys, North Carolina Sheriffs’ Association, North Carolina Association of Chiefs of Police, and North Carolina Police Executives Association filed a similar request last week.

On the other side of the case, the gun-rights group Grass Roots North Carolina, the ACLU of North Carolina, and the libertarian Cato Institute all have filed briefs supporting criminal defendant Eric James Ducker’s challenge of the felony firearm possession law.

“The Governor has a direct and substantial interest in the outcome of this constitutional challenge to the Felony Firearms Act, codified at N.C. Gen. Stat. § 14-415.1,” Stein’s lawyers wrote Monday. “As the head of the Executive Branch, Governor Stein is constitutionally charged with keeping North Carolinians safe and enforcing the laws enacted to protect them. He holds ultimate responsibility for ensuring that state laws are applied effectively and uniformly. His ability to fulfill this obligation depends on the continued enforceability of laws designed to reduce threats to the public.”

“Here, Ducker asks this Court to vacate not only his own conviction under the Felony Firearms Act but to invalidate the Act as applied to any convicted felon,” the governor’s lawyers added. “North Carolina’s Felony Firearms Act is an important tool that balances the rights of law-abiding citizens’ right to bear arms and the State’s interest in public safety: it keeps dangerous weapons away from individuals who have proven more likely than law- abiding individuals to misuse firearms.”

“A key issue in this case is the impact of the Felony Firearms Act on the firearms rights of individuals convicted of non-violent felonies,” according to the court filing. “Through his pardon power, the Governor can make a non-violent felon eligible to have their firearms rights restored. Thus, the Governor can speak to the burden of the Act on individuals who committed non-violent felonies.”

North Carolina Justice Department lawyers led by Solicitor General Nicholas Brod defended the law in a July 6 brief.

“The Felony Firearms Act … reflects the commonsense view that those convicted of serious and often violent crimes are more likely than law-abiding individuals to misuse firearms, endangering law enforcement and the public,” state lawyers wrote. “To address that acute safety risk, the Act bars felons from possessing guns. It thus seeks to deter gun violence while providing a critical tool for punishing recidivist offenders.”

“Defendant Eric Ducker challenges the Act on its face and as applied to him, under both the state and federal constitutions,” the brief continued. “Ducker’s frontline arguments are extreme. He asks this Court to overturn more than a century of precedent interpreting the state constitutional right to keep and bear arms under Article I, Section 30. And he asks this Court to become the first appellate court in the nation to facially invalidate a felon-in-possession law under the Second Amendment.”

“Accepting those arguments could open the door for even the State’s most dangerous felons — individuals convicted of crimes like murder, rape, or armed robbery — to repossess firearms, profoundly disrupting efforts to address the scourge of gun violence and related offenses,” state government lawyers wrote. “The Court should reject Ducker’s destabilizing request to upend settled firearms law across the State.”

Grass Roots North Carolina criticized the felon firearm possession law in a March 30 brief.

“Overcriminalization and overregulation have made the law endlessly more complex than it was at our Nation’s founding,” wrote lawyer Tyler Brooks while representing GRNC. “Many commentators, including a sitting U.S. Supreme Court Justice, have remarked that it is now virtually impossible for an individual to be sure she has not run afoul of some law at some time.”

“With this complexity has come a radical change in the understanding of what constitutes a felony offense,” Brooks added. “GRNC argues that the courts below erred in their application of relevant Second Amendment law when considering whether Mr. Ducker could be convicted under North Carolina’s felon in possession of a firearm statute, N.C. Gen. Stat. § 14-415.1.”

“Furthermore, GRNC argues that existing precedent on interpretation of the North Carolina Constitution’s right to keep and bear arms fails to adhere to the originalist jurisprudence more recently articulated by this Court,” the brief continued. “Therefore, it urges this Court to hold that the right to keep and bear arms guaranteed by the State Constitution is to be given heightened scrutiny and interpreted in light of the original public meaning of its language.”

Ducker is attacking the current state law as unconstitutional under both the Second Amendment to the US Constitution and Article I, § 30 of the state constitution. A unanimous North Carolina Court of Appeals panel ruled against him in May 2025.

“North Carolinians value their constitutional rights to keep and bear arms,” ACLU lawyers wrote in a friend-of-the-court brief supported by the libertarian Cato Institute. “An estimated 40 percent of North Carolinians keep guns in their homes. The rights to keep and bear arms, and to hunt, are enshrined in our state constitution.”

“Yet N.C. Gen. Stat. § 14-415.1, which categorically disarms people convicted of felonies — no matter how minor, non-violent, or old the conviction — imposes severe constraints and unequal burdens on too many North Carolinians’ exercise of their constitutional rights,” the court filing continued.

A Buncombe County jury found Ducker guilty in August 2023 of possession of a firearm by a felon. He had been convicted in 2009 of a felony charge of attempted fleeing to elude arrest. He also had been convicted in 2018 of misdemeanor violation of a domestic violence protective order.

“Under the North Carolina Constitution, it is within the Legislature’s power to regulate the right to bear arms so long as the regulation is ‘at least reasonable and not prohibitive, and [bears] a fair relation to the preservation of the public peace and safety,’” wrote Appeals Court Judge Toby Hampson in 2025.

“We have in the past upheld Section 14-415.1 and rejected the argument it violates either State or Federal Constitutional guarantees of the right to bear arms,” Hampson wrote, citing 2009 and 2017 decisions. “Defendant argues recent United States Supreme Court decisions require we revisit this analysis.”

Hampson acknowledged that the US Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in New York Pistol and Rifle Association v. Bruen changed the way courts analyze gun laws.

“Thus, under Bruen, courts apply a new two-part test to determine the constitutionality of firearms regulations,” he wrote. The government must prove that its regulation “is part of the historical tradition that delimits the outer bounds of the right to keep and bear arms.”

“This Court has examined and upheld the constitutionality of Section 14-415.1 against facial challenge following Bruen and determined its provisions fall within this historical tradition of ‘disarming individuals who pose a threat to the safety of others,’” Hampson wrote. He cited a 2025 decision in State v. Nanes.

“[W]e held Section 14-415.1 fell within the historical tradition of disarming individuals who pose a clear threat of physical violence to another, in particular because the statute includes a provision by which certain nonviolent felons may petition to have their rights restored,” Hampson added.

“We note as well that our decision in Nanes is consistent with the emerging post-Bruen consensus among federal courts that felon-in-possession statutes do not facially violate the Second Amendment,” the Appeals Court opinion continued.

Ducker raised both “facial” and “as-applied” constitutional challenges against the law. The facial challenge argued that the law is unconstitutional in all circumstances. The “as-applied” challenge argued that the law failed in Ducker’s specific circumstances.

“[W]e continue to hold Section 14-415.1 is facially constitutional under both the United States and the North Carolina Constitutions,” Hampson wrote.

The as-applied challenge was based on Ducker’s argument that “Section 14-415.1 is unconstitutional as applied to him because his predicate felony, Attempted Fleeing to Elude Arrest, was nonviolent in nature,” Hampson wrote. Ducker attempted to distinguish himself from the defendant in the Nanes case, who had a “demonstrated history of violence against others.”

“However, we need not perform this felony-by-felony analysis to determine the constitutionality of Section 14-415.1 as applied to each individual defendant who challenges it,” Hampson explained. “Prior to the Supreme Court’s decision in Bruen, we held as-applied challenges to Section 14-415.1 to be universally unavailing because convicted felons fall outside of the protections of the Second Amendment.”

Hampson cited recent decisions from the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals and the nation’s highest court. “We note the United States Supreme Court in its recent jurisprudence on the matter has made it clear that prohibitions on firearm possession by felons are presumptively lawful.”

“Although Bruen rejects means-end scrutiny to determine what regulations on protected conduct are acceptable, it does not affect our understanding of the types of conduct the Second Amendment protects,” Hampson wrote. “As the Supreme Court has repeatedly, in Bruen and other decisions, defined the right to bear arms as one afforded to ‘law-abiding citizens,’ nothing in Bruen upsets prior determinations that the possession of firearms by felons falls outside of its protections.”

The Appeals Court rejected Ducker’s state constitutional arguments. “Section 14-415.1 is a reasonable regulation which is ‘fairly related to the preservation of public peace and safety’ as applied to Defendant,” Hampson wrote. “It is not unreasonable to disarm an individual who was convicted of a felony, subsequently violated a domestic violence protective order, and chose to continue to carry a firearm in violation of the law.”

Judges Donna Stroud and John Tyson joined Hampson’s opinion.

“Stein urges top NC court to uphold law against felons owning guns” was originally published on www.carolinajournal.com.