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Court Upholds NC Gun Ban for Felons
RALEIGH — A U.S. appeals court has upheld a 1995 change in North Carolina law limiting the right of felons to own handguns. Significantly, in doing so, the Richmond-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit held that the law can be applied even against those convicted of felonies before the General Assembly’s passage of a 1995 amendment, which transformed a previous five-year ban on felons possessing handguns into a lifelong ban. The felon had challenged the retroactive application of the ban as an ex post facto law. But courts have distinguished between retroactive punishment, which is unconstitutional, and retroactive civil laws, which are not.