The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld the ban on firearm possession for a felon who was at fault in a reckless driving incident.

On Wednesday, a unanimous three-judge panel tossed Joseph Lee Betancourt’s Second Amendment challenge to the federal felon gun ban. They rejected his argument that his conviction shouldn’t lead to disarmament because he didn’t intentionally harm those injured in the car accident he caused. Instead, the panel found his acts showed he is a danger to society, and the government can bar him from owning guns.

“The details of Betancourt’s aggravated assault convictions show that his Second Amendment challenge must fail,” Judge Catharina Haynes wrote in US v. Betancourt. “As described above, Betancourt disregarded a flashing red light while driving at his vehicle’s maximum speed, 107 miles per hour, causing a major crash and serious injuries to two people. He accordingly ‘poses a threat to public safety.'”

The ruling is one of the first where an appeals court has held that the Second Amendment does not protect a felon whose conduct did not involve a firearm or intent. It adds to the lower court split over which felons can be disarmed and continues the trend of courts upholding most applications of federal gun laws. The trend began with 2024’s US v. Rahimi when the Supreme Court allowed the government to disarm an individual for being a “clear threat of physical violence” if they had a domestic violence restraining order issued against them.

In Rahimi, the defendant was convicted of possessing firearms after his domestic violence restraining order had stripped him of his Second Amendment rights. Since then, the Supreme Court has not taken up any other disarmament cases, but several lower courts have expounded on other offenses they believe justify the punishment.

This case stems from a pair of felony convictions for aggravated assault related to the same incident.

“Betancourt had been driving at his vehicle’s maximum speed of 107 miles per hour, with the accelerator fully activated,” Judge  “He disregarded a flashing red light and caused a major collision. His vehicle flipped several times, and his passenger was ejected from the vehicle. The passenger and the driver of the other vehicle were hospitalized. The passenger needed stitches to close a laceration on her face, and the other driver needed surgery to repair a ruptured small intestine.”

Betancourt pled guilty to the charges. After he served the time for the aggravated assault conviction from the reckless driving, he was arrested during a separate domestic violence incident–which could independently lead to his disarmament under federal law. Police searched Betancourt’s home and found guns and ammunition. He was charged with violating the federal felon-in-possession ban.

Betancourt pled guilty to that charge as well, but with the option to file for appeal. He then appealed on the basis that the federal ban, as applied to him, violates the Second Amendment. He claimed that his predicate felony conduct was committed out of recklessness rather than intent to injure others, and because his predicate offense did not involve a firearm, his offense was not a sufficient reason to strip away his rights.

Betancourt argued that the Second Amendment protected his right to possess a firearm because there are no analogous Founding-Era gun restrictions that would have seen him similarly disarmed for his conviction stemming from the reckless driving incident.

The panel, which also included a pair of Bill Clinton appointees, disagreed. It cited the test established in 2022’s New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, which assesses when a government regulation violates the Second Amendment. The panel said the first part of the test assesses whether the Second Amendment’s plain text covers the regulated conduct. Then, it argued the court “must demonstrate that the regulation is consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

The panel pointed to recent cases where judges outlined the Founding Era legal tradition and argued they were “relevantly similar” to the case at hand.

In Rahimi, the Supreme Court ruled that “[a]n individual found by a court to pose a credible threat to the physical safety of another may be temporarily disarmed consistent with the Second Amendment.” Last year, in Diaz v. US, the Fifth Circuit ruled that regulating a person’s possession of a firearm based on prior convictions that are “punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year” fit into the American tradition of arms regulation and, thus, Second Amendment protections do not apply.

The panel also cited 2025’s US v. Schnur. In Schnur, the defendant was similarly convicted of possessing a firearm after a predicate offense that did not involve a firearm. The panel held that Schnur was a valid precedent against Betancourt’s argument that he couldn’t be disarmed because his initial conviction wasn’t gun-related.

“Cases like Diaz, Schnur, and Williams demonstrate the existence of a Founding-era legal tradition that was applied in a way ‘relevantly similar’ to the application today of § 922(g)(1) to Betancourt,” Judge Haynes wrote.

Ultimately, the panel ruled that in Betancourt’s predicate felony, he had put his passenger and the passengers of the other vehicle at risk, thus placing him in the category of “clear threat to physical violence.”

“Specifically, he ‘put’ his passenger’s ‘safety at risk,’ along with the safety of the driver of the other vehicle, who needed surgery after Betancourt caused the crash. In short, the Second Amendment does not prohibit applying § 922(g)(1) to him here.” Judge Haynes wrote. “We therefore are unpersuaded by Betancourt’s argument that there is not a sufficiently apt Founding-era analogue for his aggravated assault convictions under which the Founding generation would have disarmed the offender.”