Court Strips Second Amendment Rights Away If You Have Two DUIs

Gun rights attorney and YouTuber Tom Grieve is warning that a new Washington state Supreme Court ruling could open the door to much broader restrictions on Second Amendment rights, after the court upheld a law that temporarily strips firearm rights from people with two drunk driving convictions within seven years.

In a recent video, Grieve said the case involves two Washington state residents, Joffrey Mullen and Jackson Holloway, who were denied concealed carry permits not because of felony convictions, domestic violence injunctions, mental health commitments, or findings that they were personally dangerous, but because each had two DUI convictions within a seven-year period.

“A state supreme court has just legally sanctioned stripping gun rights if you have two traffic offenses within seven years,” Grieve said.

Under the Washington law, Grieve explained, the restriction lasts five years, during which the person cannot possess firearms, shoot, purchase firearms, or receive concealed carry permits.

The Washington Case At The Center Of The Ruling

Grieve made clear early in the video that his criticism of the ruling should not be read as a defense of drunk driving.

“I am not like a drunk driving enthusiast,” he said. “I’m not pro-drunk driving or people going out and getting loaded and getting behind the wheel or anything like that.”

Instead, Grieve framed the issue as a constitutional rights question, saying he is “pro-constitutional rights,” “pro-civil rights,” and “pro-liberty.”

According to Grieve, Washington passed the law in 2023 to temporarily strip firearm rights from people who receive two drunk driving convictions within seven years. Mullen and Holloway challenged the law under the Second Amendment, but the Washington Supreme Court ruled in June 2026 that the restriction was constitutional.

For Grieve, the danger is not only the outcome for these two men, but the court’s reasoning. He argued that the logic used to uphold the law could be applied far beyond drunk driving.

“The reasoning and the rationale of what the court did and how it got there, to say that it is dangerous, to say that it sets a slippery slope,” Grieve said, before adding that gun owners already “live on the slippery slope all the time.”

Grieve Says Bruen Put The Burden On Government

Grieve walked viewers through the legal standard set by the United States Supreme Court in the 2022 Bruen decision, which requires the government to show that a firearm regulation is consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.

He said that burden belongs to the government, not the individual challenging the restriction.

“The government has the duty and burden to show that its regulation is constitutional by showing that it is part of the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation,” Grieve said.

In Grieve’s view, that tradition must come from the founding era or Reconstruction period, not modern policy preferences from the 1990s or 2010s. He also argued that one obscure historical law from one town, village, or county should not be enough to justify a broad modern restriction.

The key point, as Grieve presented it, is that constitutional rights are supposed to be anchored to the meaning and traditions that surrounded them when they were adopted. He also pushed back against the idea that modern firearms lose protection simply because they did not exist in 1791, comparing that argument to saying computers are not protected by the First Amendment or cars are not protected by the Fourth Amendment.

That portion of his argument matters because it goes to the heart of many current gun cases. Courts are no longer supposed to simply decide whether a law sounds reasonable as a policy; after Bruen, they are supposed to ask whether the government can point to a proper historical analogue.

Three Historical Threads, One New Category

Grieve said the Washington Supreme Court acknowledged the Bruen framework, but then upheld the DUI firearm restriction by stitching together three historical traditions.

Those included laws disarming dangerous categories of people, laws restricting firearms for those convicted of serious crimes, and laws limiting the combination of alcohol and firearms.

According to Grieve, the court treated those three threads together as enough to justify disarming people with repeat DUI convictions, even though DUI offenders are not part of the traditional categories of disarmed people such as felons, people under domestic abuse injunctions, or people who have been involuntarily committed.

Grieve argued that the court’s logic was based heavily on correlation, saying the justices appeared to reason that people who misuse alcohol may be more likely to become involved in violence, and that the state can therefore disarm them for a period of time.

“And that kind of carousel of logic is how we then got to the okay, this is where they wanted to go,” Grieve said.

He also noted that the decision was not unanimous. Grieve said the dissent focused on the fact that Washington had created a new disarmament category outside the historically accepted ones, based not on a felony or domestic violence order, but on the idea that certain behavior may correlate with future violence.

That is where the ruling becomes especially concerning for gun owners. If a state can create new categories by arguing that some past conduct statistically predicts future danger, the debate may no longer be limited to serious violent convictions.

The Slippery Slope Concern

Grieve’s main objection was that the court’s reasoning could be used to justify disarming many other groups.

“If this case is allowed to stand, if the reasoning and the logic that it is based on is allowed to stand, then I ask you this question: why are we stopping at just drunk drivings?” he said.

He asked why the restriction should last five years instead of 10, 20, or 30 if the state’s theory is that the person belongs to a group more likely to commit violence in the future. He then moved through several examples, including people convicted of battery, assault, drug possession, or drug-related offenses.

Grieve said some viewers may shrug at those examples and say people who “screw around” should “find out,” but he warned that the same reasoning does not have a natural stopping point.

He then asked whether people who voluntarily check into rehab could lose gun rights because substance abuse might correlate with violence, or whether people without high school diplomas could be restricted because certain statistics might show higher risks later in life.

From there, Grieve pushed the point even further, raising the possibility of restrictions based on poverty, neighborhoods with higher crime, age, or even sex, noting that males are heavily overrepresented in violent crime statistics.

“Does this mean that all males should be banned from possessing firearms?” he asked.

Grieve’s point was not that Washington has already gone that far, but that the underlying logic could be stretched in that direction if courts allow rights to be taken based on broad risk categories rather than individual findings.

A Rights Case That Reaches Beyond Guns

One of Grieve’s stronger arguments was that the same “ends justify the means” logic could eventually be applied to other constitutional protections.

He asked viewers to imagine similar reasoning applied to the Fourth Amendment, where a person who entered rehab, used drugs, lived in a particular neighborhood, or fit some demographic risk profile might lose protections against searches and seizures because the government believes that category is more likely to be involved in crime.

That example is useful because it moves the discussion beyond gun politics. Even people who are not enthusiastic about firearms should be cautious about legal theories that let the government dilute constitutional rights based on predictions and group data.

“We are talking about the ends justifying the means,” Grieve said. “And anytime you get to that kind of logic, anytime you see a legislative branch or an executive branch or court applying that ends justify the means, rest assured you are on the road to hell.”

That language is strong, but Grieve’s concern is clear: once the government can say public safety allows it to suspend one right for one category of people, the same argument may become tempting in many other settings.

Grieve Turns To Heller For The Bigger Principle

Grieve closed with a quote from Justice Antonin Scalia’s opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller, the landmark Supreme Court case recognizing an individual right to keep and bear arms outside of militia service.

“The enshrinement of constitutional rights necessarily takes certain policy choices off the table,” Grieve quoted from Heller.

He summarized the point by saying that policy choices cannot remain available to lawmakers if they infringe on constitutional rights. For Grieve, that applies not only to the Second Amendment, but to all rights.

That is the central tension in the Washington ruling as he sees it. The state says repeat DUI convictions justify a temporary firearm ban because of public safety concerns. Grieve argues that the court accepted a dangerous shortcut, allowing a modern state to create a new category of disarmed people by combining historical analogies that do not directly match the law at issue.

The ruling may be limited to Washington and to a five-year restriction for repeat DUI offenders, but Grieve warned that the reasoning behind it matters everywhere.

His message to gun owners was not simply that two men were denied concealed carry permits. It was that the government found a new way to take away firearm rights from people who had not been convicted of a felony or found individually dangerous by a court.

For Grieve, that is the part of the case that should concern anyone who believes constitutional rights should not depend on whether a judge or legislature thinks a person’s category is risky enough to exclude.