1. United States
2. Ohio
3. Letter

On Monday, Attorney General Todd Blanche, Trump’s "former" personal defense lawyer, finalized a rule creating a new pathway for convicted felons to get their gun rights back. Now, they say violent felons and sex offenders will stay ineligible. Everyone else gets reviewed case by case. If you trust the people making the call, maybe there are cases where this makes sense. Somebody made one mistake decades ago and turned their life around. Reasonable people can debate that. But that’s the whole problem. This system runs entirely on the judgment of the people making the call. And these are people who look you in the eyes and tell you that January 6th rioters were peaceful protesters exercising their rights. Rioters who beat police officers with flagpoles. And we don’t have to guess how they’ll use this power. Look at what happened last year, when the U.S. Pardon Attorney was fired. She says it happened right after she refused to recommend restoring the gun rights of the actor Mel Gibson, who had pleaded no contest to domestic battery against a former girlfriend. Her termination letter was signed by Blanche, who was Deputy Attorney General at the time. In this reality, if you don’t want to arm a domestic abuser, you get fired. It doesn’t matter if this rule sounds reasonable, because rules are only as trustworthy as the people enforcing them. And there is not one trustworthy thing about a DOJ run by Trump’s "former" personal lawyer.