Shall Not Be Infringed

Redemption, Restoration, and the Fight for Full Second Amendment Citizenship

By: Chris Edwards

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

In Alamogordo, New Mexico, Chris Edwards rebuilt his life 12 years after a federal felony conviction—general manager of a daily radio station kalhradio.org, publishing local news at AlamogordoTownNews.org, authoring bestselling books, and advising winning political campaigns. Yet federal law (18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(1)) and New Mexico statute (§ 30-7-16) still bar him from lawfully possessing a firearm for home defense or hunting, a lifetime (federal) or ten-year (state) prohibition that treats a nonviolent white-collar offender as a perpetual threat.

Shall Not Be Infringed is both a personal memoir and a constitutional call to action. Edwards traces the Second Amendment’s history of selective disarmament—from colonial slave codes and post-Civil War Black Codes to the Sullivan Act (1911), Watson v. Stone (1941), and the Mulford Act (1967)—showing how gun control often served racial and social control rather than neutral safety. He examines the 1968 Gun Control Act’s broad felon ban, the 1992 defunding of § 925(c) relief, and the racial disparities that persist: Black Americans comprise over 58% of federal § 922(g) convictions despite being 13% of the population (U.S. Sentencing Commission FY2023).

The book analyzes landmark post-Bruen (2022) litigation—Range v. Attorney General (3d Cir. 2024), Rahimi (2024), and relisted cases like Vincent v. Bondi—that challenge lifetime disarmament of rehabilitated nonviolent offenders under the text-history-tradition test. It celebrates Attorney General Pam Bondi’s 2025 revival of § 925(c) relief, the first meaningful federal pathway in over thirty years for nonviolent individuals to petition for restoration.

In New Mexico, Edwards critiques the 2019 Otero County and Alamogordo Second Amendment sanctuary declarations that resisted state overreach but ignored felon bars, and the 2026 session’s focus on harsher penalties (HB 49) over reform. He calls for consistent application: automatic restoration for nonviolent felons after 3–5 clean years, administrative petitions modeled on § 925(c), and bipartisan study commissions on disparities and recidivism.

This is not a plea for leniency—it is a demand for constitutional fidelity. The Second Amendment belongs to the people, not only the never-convicted. When danger has ended, the right must return.

For readers who value originalism, rural self-reliance, veteran redemption, and true equality under the law, Shall Not Be Infringed offers a powerful, evidence-based argument and a roadmap for change.