For more than three decades, a federal felony conviction meant a permanent loss of Second Amendment rights, in practice if not on paper. The law had always contained a mechanism for restoration—18 U.S.C. § 925(c)—but Congress quietly gutted it in 1992 by barring the ATF from spending any money to process applications. The result was a statute that technically existed but functioned as a dead letter for over thirty years, leaving millions of Americans with old convictions no r