> You don't want to give banking license to a convicted felon.
Why not? "Convicted felon" encompasses a lot. Being convicted of felony drug possession when you were 19, for example, has very little to do with one's ability or trustworthiness to run a bank.
Sure, maybe we don't give banking licenses to people who have committed financial crimes (though a lot of corrupt investment bank executives seem to have no problem doing business), but that's not the same thing.
This idea that committing a crime should lock people out of many life activities is one of the things that leads them to committing more crimes. The punishment was a fine or jail time; let's stop punishing people for the rest of their lives.
This was also the ACB take on Second Amendment rights which you may remember from recent confirmation hearings: yes, we can let felons have guns, because a felony "includes everything from Kanter's offense, mail fraud, to selling pigs without a license in Massachusetts, redeeming large quantities of out-of-state bottle deposits in Michigan, and countless other state and federal offenses." Thus it's very poorly related to the risk levels involved. (DC vs Heller.)
Overreliance on the category "felon" also shows up in a recent Gorsuch take on the Fourth Amendment: "We live in a world in which everything has been criminalized. And some professors have even opined that there's not an American alive who hasn't committed a felony in some—under some state law. And in a world like that, why doesn't it make sense to retreat back to the original meaning of the Fourth Amendment, which I'm going to oversimplify, but generally says that you get to go into a home without a warrant if the officer sees a violent action or something that's likely to lead to imminent violence… Why isn't that the right approach?
(Lange v. California)
Yep, if a felony wasn't violent, or perhaps not even gun-related, I don't see why felons shouldn't be able to own guns.
(I mean, I'm generally against the level of private gun ownership we have in the US, but given 2A, it seems like a violation to deny anyone their constitutional rights based on a broad label like "felon".)
Why not? "Convicted felon" encompasses a lot. Being convicted of felony drug possession when you were 19, for example, has very little to do with one's ability or trustworthiness to run a bank.
Sure, maybe we don't give banking licenses to people who have committed financial crimes (though a lot of corrupt investment bank executives seem to have no problem doing business), but that's not the same thing.
This idea that committing a crime should lock people out of many life activities is one of the things that leads them to committing more crimes. The punishment was a fine or jail time; let's stop punishing people for the rest of their lives.