Given a second bite at the apple, the Third Circuit has once again ruled that a Pennsylvania man can own firearms despite his felony-level conviction.

By a 13-2 margin, a full panel of the federal appellate court on Monday reaffirmed its basic holding from last June that a 30-year-old conviction for lying on a food stamp application cannot result in lifetime disarmament. The court’s opinion, made necessary after the Supreme Court vacated and remanded its prior decision in light of US v. Rahimi, remained essentially unchanged in finding no historical tradition supporting the federal gun ban for felons as applied to Pennsylvania man Bryan Range.

“We agree with Range that, despite his false statement conviction, he remains among ‘the people’ protected by the Second Amendment,” Judge Thomas Hardiman wrote in Range v. Garland. “And because the Government did not carry its burden of showing that the principles underlying our Nation’s history and tradition of firearm regulation support disarming Range, we will reverse and remand.”

The opinion officially reinstates the first appeals court decision to strike down the nation’s most commonly enforced federal gun-control law. It also highlights the continued uncertainty over what the Supreme Court’s Rahimi ruling actually means for Second Amendment jurisprudence. It may set up the High Court to further refine its framework for gun rights, especially for those convicted of serious crimes.

In an 8-1 ruling, the Court upheld the federal gun ban for those subject to domestic violence restraining orders. Justice Clarance Thomas, the lone dissenter, argued that the Majority used a loose application of its new Second Amendment test to reach its decision. He said the decision could grant the Government undue deference in future disarmament cases.

“The Court recognizes that surety and affray laws on their own are not enough. So, it takes pieces from each to stitch together an analogue for §922(g)(8),” Thomas wrote in his Rahimi dissent. “Our precedents foreclose that approach. The question before us is whether a single historical law has both a comparable burden and justification as §922(g)(8), not whether several laws can be cobbled together to qualify.”

However, Rahimi may have had the opposite effect in Range. Two judges in the dissent last year joined the Majority this time.

Still, while the court re-evaluated Range’s case with Rahimi in mind, that decision played only a minor supporting role in the Majority’s analysis. The majority opinion was nearly identical to its previous version. When Rahimi did appear, each judge to do so seemed to invoke it as support for their reading of the law in question.

“Rahimi makes clear that citizens are not excluded from Second Amendment protections just because they are not ‘responsible,'” Hardiman, a George W. Bush appointee, wrote.

As for the historical analysis, Hardiman argued that the historical analogues the Supreme Court found sufficient to disarm Rahimi do not apply to Range.

“Rahimi did bless disarming (at least temporarily) physically dangerous people,” he wrote. “But the Government does not try to justify disarming Range on this ground, and with good reason: it has no evidence that he poses a physical danger to others or that food-stamp fraud is closely associated with physical danger.”

Hardiman also rebutted claims made by the Government and the judges in the dissent that Rahimi authorized disarmament in cases dealing with crimes for which the analogous Founding-era punishment could have been death.

“Though our dissenting colleagues read Rahimi as blessing disarmament as a lesser punishment generally, the Court did not do that,” he wrote. “Instead, it authorized temporary disarmament as a sufficient analogue to historic temporary imprisonment only to ‘respond to the use of guns to threaten the physical safety of others.'”

Ultimately, Hardiman concluded that the Government once again failed to demonstrate a longstanding history and tradition of “depriving people like Range of their firearms” and struck down the felon-in-possession ban as applied to him. He did, however, caution that the decision is “a narrow one” that does not attempt to opine on the federal ban more broadly or craft a framework for evaluating future as-applied challenges to the law. This narrow focus prompted multiple judges to weigh in with critiques from various directions.

Judge Peter Phipps, a Donald Trump appointee, wrote separately to agree with the outcome but note his belief that the felon-in-possession ban “is constitutionally suspect as a facial matter.”

“I see no historical analogue for the lifetime disarmament of an otherwise free citizen,” he wrote. “Once a citizen repays his debt to society, a legislative restriction on the right to keep and bear arms based on nothing more than a prior conviction is without relevant historical antecedent. And legislation permanently disarming a person who has already repaid his debt to society is even further removed from our Founding-era heritage.”

Judge Cheryl Ann Krause, a Barack Obama appointee, dissented the first time the Third Circuit heard Range but concurred in the judgment this time. However, she chastised the Majority for not taking Rahimi more seriously.

“My colleagues in the majority have treated the Supreme Court’s remand as essentially pro forma and file an opinion today that is largely unchanged,” she wrote. “It also still insists on analyzing § 922(g)(1) on an offense-by-offense basis, demanding that any historical analogue match with high precision, rather than reasoning by principle. And it again declines to articulate any clear framework by which courts may distinguish between constitutional and unconstitutional applications of § 922(g)(1).”

“These aspects of the majority opinion are in error,” she continued. “I ultimately concur in the judgment, however, because Rahimi’s reasoning persuades me that—even though our historical tradition supports § 922(g)(1) ‘s categorical disarmament of all felons on a presumptively permanent basis—the Second Amendment demands that the disability it imposes has at least the potential to be ‘of limited duration,’ and that a felon have a meaningful opportunity, after successfully serving his sentence, to show that the burden should be lifted based on individualized findings.”

Judge Patty Schwartz, also an Obama appointee, went further. In a dissent joined by Joe Biden appointee L. Felipe Restrepo, she accused the Majority of failing to heed the Supreme Court’s precedent. She warned it would create “far-reaching consequences” for the criminal justice system.

“The Majority’s ruling is not cabined in any way and, in fact, rejects all historical support for disarming non-violent felons,” Schwartz wrote. “As a result, the Majority’s analytical framework leads to only one conclusion: there will be no, or virtually no, non-violent felony or felony-equivalent crime that will bar an individual from possessing a firearm. Rahimi counsels that cannot be so, which is why the Majority’s broad ruling is contrary to both the sentiments of the Supreme Court and our history.”

The decision creates new urgency surrounding the growing circuit split developing around convicted felons and Second Amendment rights. Because Monday’s opinion came from an en banc panel, it will stand unless the Supreme Court overturns it