This guest post does not necessarily reflect the views of the Duke Center for Firearms Law. The author wishes to thank Associate Professor Alexa Perez of Drake Law School for her thoughtful comments and edits on earlier drafts of this piece.
Iowa voters amended their constitution in 2022 to require strict scrutiny for “any and all restrictions” on the right to keep and bear arms. Just four months earlier, however, the United States Supreme Court decided Bruen, rejecting strict scrutiny in favor of a history-and-tradition methodology. Iowa’s Supreme Court now faces a constitutional conundrum: reconciling two constitutional approaches that point in different directions.
The Iowa Supreme Court’s decisions in State v. Mahana, No. 24-0239 (Iowa June 12, 2026), and State v. Schadl, No. 25-0575 (Iowa June 26, 2026), expose the resulting methodological dispute. The central question is whether courts should use the originalist framework of Heller and Bruen to define the scope of the right protected by Article I, Section 1A of the Iowa Constitution before applying the strict scrutiny that the amendment expressly requires. If originalism defines the right at the threshold, it may determine whether strict scrutiny applies. The question is not simply whether originalism and strict scrutiny can coexist, but what role, if any, originalism should play in interpreting a constitutional provision that expressly commands strict scrutiny.
State v. Mahana
Mahana gave the Iowa Supreme Court its first opportunity to consider the constitutionality of Iowa’s felon-in-possession statute, Iowa Code sections 724.25(1) and 724.26(1), following the United States Supreme Court’s decisions in Bruen and Rahimi. Mahana was convicted of an offense that, although labeled a misdemeanor, qualified as a felony under Iowa law because it was punishable by more than one year’s imprisonment. He later deliberately possessed a handgun to create a test case and, following his conviction, challenged Iowa’s felon-in-possession statute under both the Second Amendment and Article I, Section 1A of the Iowa Constitution. The Iowa Supreme Court rejected both his facial and as-applied challenges and affirmed his conviction.
Two Different Questions
Justice Mansfield authored the majority opinion, joined by Chief Justice Christensen and Justices Waterman, McDermott, and May. Justice McDonald, joined by Justice Oxley, concurred in the judgment. Although all seven justices agreed on the result, they sharply disagreed over the proper framework for evaluating firearm restrictions under Article I, Section 1A. That methodological disagreement is among the most significant aspects of Mahana.
Mahana raised both facial and as-applied challenges to Iowa’s felon-in-possession statute. Addressing the Second Amendment claim, Justice Mansfield noted the growing circuit split over the constitutionality of the federal felon-in-possession statute, 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(1). Some circuits permit the categorical disarmament of all felons; others recognize as-applied challenges based on such considerations as the nature of the predicate offense, the defendant’s criminal history, or dangerousness.
Justice Mansfield declined to choose between these approaches because Mahana’s challenge failed under both. Under the categorical approach, his prior conviction was sufficient. Under an individualized approach, his extensive criminal history—including weapons offenses, domestic abuse assault, criminal mischief, and continued unlawful firearm possession—justified his disarmament. The court thus left the federal question open for a case in which the choice between the competing approaches would matter.
Nevertheless, Mansfield’s analysis repeatedly emphasized individualized dangerousness. His reliance on Mahana’s personal history and criticism of limiting the inquiry to the predicate offense suggest that, when ultimately forced to choose, the court may favor an individualized dangerousness approach over categorical disarmament.
The court’s restraint on the federal question contrasts sharply with its treatment of the Iowa Constitution. There, Justice Mansfield directly confronted the meaning of Article I, Section 1A, exposing a fundamental disagreement with Justice McDonald over the role of originalism in interpreting a right expressly subject to strict scrutiny.
Two Competing Methodologies
Justice Mansfield’s approach was straightforward. Bruen rejected means-end scrutiny under the Second Amendment; Article I, Section 1A expressly requires strict scrutiny of “any and all restrictions” on the right to keep and bear arms. Applying traditional strict scrutiny, Mansfield rejected Mahana’s facial and as-applied challenges. His as-applied analysis again focused on dangerousness, relying on Mahana’s repeated criminal conduct, violent behavior, weapons history, and demonstrated disregard for the law.
Justice McDonald took a different approach. Rather than reaching strict scrutiny, he employed what some commentators call “Bruen Step Zero.” The threshold question, in his view, was whether Mahana’s conduct fell within the scope of the right protected by Article I, Section 1A. Applying an originalist—or “original law”—approach modeled on the Supreme Court’s Second Amendment methodology, McDonald emphasized that Iowa has prohibited felons from possessing firearms since 1978. He therefore concluded that the right adopted in 2022 did not extend to felons. Because Mahana had no protected right, strict scrutiny did not apply. (No one raised this issue in the trial court or in their appellate briefs).
Mahana thus exposed a fundamental methodological dispute: What role should originalism play in defining a constitutional right whose restrictions are expressly subject to strict scrutiny? The ink had scarcely dried before the question resurfaced in Schadl. There, the methodological divide became outcome-determinative.
State v. Schadl
State v. Schadl was filed just two weeks after Mahana. In July 2024, police investigating a report of unlawful firearm possession learned that Schadl owned a .22-caliber rifle. Schadl acknowledged that a 2010 domestic abuse assault conviction prohibited him from possessing it. The State charged him under Iowa Code section 724.26(2)(a), which prohibits firearm possession by a person convicted of a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence. Schadl moved to dismiss, raising facial and as-applied challenges under both the Iowa and federal constitutions.
Schadl produced the same 5-2 alignment as Mahana, with Justice McDonald again writing separately, this time in dissent.
The majority resolved the case solely under Article I, Section 1A. After quickly rejecting Schadl’s facial challenge, McDermott turned to his as-applied claim, emphasizing that strict scrutiny in a firearms case “must not deviate from how we apply the standard in other contexts.” The State therefore bore the burden of proving that Schadl’s indefinite disarmament was narrowly tailored—and the least restrictive means—to further a compelling state interest.
The State’s compelling interest in protecting the public from gun violence by domestic abusers was undisputed. The question was whether permanently disarming Schadl, based on a conviction nearly fourteen years old, was narrowly tailored to that interest. The State, having failed to recognize that it bore the burden of proof, presented no evidence at trial that Schadl remained dangerous.
On appeal, the State attempted to fill that gap with studies suggesting heightened recidivism among domestic abusers. But those studies had not been introduced at trial or subjected to adversarial testing. The court also identified research suggesting that recidivism risk declines with time. On the record before it, the State had failed to prove that Schadl posed an ongoing danger or that his indefinite disarmament was narrowly tailored to public safety. The Iowa Supreme Court therefore reversed Schadl’s conviction and remanded the case to the district court for dismissal of the charge.
Dissent and Responses
Justice McDonald’s dissent was more than a disagreement over the outcome. It was his fullest articulation yet of an interpretive methodology for Article I, Section 1A. Consistent with his concurrence in Mahana, McDonald argued that courts must first determine the original public meaning and historical scope of the right before applying strict scrutiny. If the challenged restriction falls outside that scope, strict scrutiny never begins.
Applying that framework, McDonald concluded that the right adopted in 2022 did not extend to persons convicted of domestic violence offenses. Because such firearm restrictions were established by the time of ratification, Schadl was not among the “law-abiding citizens” protected by the right. Whether he remained dangerous was therefore irrelevant. The central difficulty with the dissent’s approach is that defining the scope of the right at the threshold can make the amendment’s strict-scrutiny command disappear before strict scrutiny ever begins.
The majority took the opposite approach. For Justice McDermott, dangerousness was relevant to whether Schadl’s indefinite disarmament was narrowly tailored to the State’s public-safety interest. The statute treated all offenders alike, regardless of their present risk of recidivism.
As readers of my previous blog posts know, I read appellate cases through the lens of a former trial judge. Now that I teach at Drake Law School, I now also read them through an academic lens. From those perspectives, I see both doctrinal and practical reasons to reject the dissent’s approach in Schadl.
Trial judges rarely cast their lot with dissenters. But there are additional reasons to reject the dissent’s methodology in Schadl.
The Doctrinal Reasons to Reject the Dissent
Iowa is one of the few states whose constitution expressly requires strict scrutiny of restrictions on the right to keep and bear arms. The resulting methodological disagreement results from an accident of timing: Iowa’s strict-scrutiny amendment was drafted before Bruen rejected means-end scrutiny but ratified after that decision. The Iowa Supreme Court is thus left to reconcile two frameworks that were never designed to coexist.
Should originalism be used to define the right that is subject to strict scrutiny? I think not. The two methodologies ask fundamentally different questions. Strict scrutiny asks whether the government has a compelling interest and whether the challenged restriction is narrowly tailored and the least restrictive means of achieving it. Those inquiries consider present-day justifications, evidence, effectiveness, and over- or underinclusiveness.
The originalist methodology of Heller and Bruen looks backward. It asks whether a firearm regulation is consistent with historical understandings and traditions rather than whether the government’s present-day justification survives means-end scrutiny. Bruen expressly rejected the judicial balancing that strict scrutiny requires.
Justice McDonald’s approach presents an additional problem. He defines the scope of the right by looking to restrictions in place when Article I, Section 1A was ratified. That reasoning risks becoming circular:
Why do they fall outside the constitutional right? Because Iowa already prohibited them from possessing firearms when the amendment was adopted. Under McDonald’s logic, the legislature could have insulated any firearm restriction from the amendment simply by enacting it before November 2022. The amendment would then constrain only future legislation, effectively turning “any and all restrictions” into “any and all restrictions enacted after 2022.”
Used this way, originalism threatens to swallow strict scrutiny. The amendment does not merely protect a right; it also prescribes a methodology: “any and all restrictions of this right shall be subject to strict scrutiny.” Yet McDonald’s approach permits the preexisting statutory landscape to define the scope of the right before that scrutiny ever begins.
The practical difference is significant. A person with a single, thirty-year-old conviction for tax fraud and an otherwise clean record receives no strict-scrutiny review under McDonald’s approach; under Mansfield’s, the State must justify applying a lifetime firearms prohibition to that individual. The question is which approach better reflects the constitutional process Iowa voters adopted.
Let us look at text and history for a moment. Iowa voters ratified an amendment containing language the Second Amendment lacks. The right is expressly declared “fundamental,” and “any and all restrictions” of that right are subject to strict scrutiny. Words make a difference.
Because the amendment was adopted by the voters, the relevant question is what the ratifying public understood it to mean. Justice McDonald answers that the voters’ understanding of the right was “coextensive with the Supreme Court’s formulation of the right as one belonging to law-abiding citizens as expressed in Heller, McDonald, and culminating in Bruen.” He adds that “the people, like legislators, are presumed to know the law.”
The presumption that citizens know the law does not, however, establish that Iowa voters understood the amendment to incorporate Justice McDonald’s particular reading of the Supreme Court’s Second Amendment cases. Bruen had been decided only four and a half months before the vote, and courts themselves were still struggling to determine the meaning and implications of its newly announced text, history, and tradition methodology.
Even assuming voters knew Heller, McDonald, and Bruen, it does not follow that they understood references to “law-abiding citizens” as defining the boundaries of the constitutional right—and thereby eliminating strict-scrutiny review for everyone outside that category.
As constitutional scholar Erwin Chemerinsky recently observed, “The Supreme Court has made a mess of the Second Amendment.” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson similarly noted that in Rahami that “lower courts are struggling” to apply the Court’s recent Second Amendment precedents and that “confusion plagues the lower courts.” Those observations make it difficult to assume that Iowa voters understood themselves to be incorporating this unsettled federal doctrine into the state constitution.
We cannot divine the voters’ collective intent, but we do know about the environment in which the amendment was adopted. Iowa had long embraced a permissive approach to firearm regulation, and the amendment was promoted as strengthening the right to keep and bear arms. That context is a better guide to public understanding than the fiction that ordinary voters had mastered the Supreme Court’s rapidly evolving Second Amendment jurisprudence. The historical record suggests that the amendment’s purpose was to make restrictions on the right to keep and bear arms harder to sustain—not to import into the Iowa Constitution an interpretive methodology that could prevent the amendment’s express strict-scrutiny requirement from ever coming into play.
Applying Schadl in the Trial Court
The state must prove individualized, present dangerousness. The trial court will have to determine whether the defendant poses the kind of danger that justifies continued disarmament. For a trial judge, that raises difficult questions for which Schadl offers no clear guidance. To the extent Schadl requires an individualized assessment of whether disarmament is justified, what evidence is sufficient to carry the State’s strict-scrutiny burden? These are the questions Iowa trial judges will likely confront:
- When is an evidentiary hearing required?
- What evidence bears on present dangerousness, and who must produce it?
- What role should recidivism studies and expert testimony play?
- What findings are necessary for meaningful appellate review?
In response to those questions, I offer several general observations:
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An as-applied challenge should be decided after an evidentiary hearing when the defendant claims that the statutory disqualification may no longer be justified as applied to him or her. The State bears the burden of showing that the statute is narrowly tailored to eliminate the risk of harm presented by the defendant.
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The State must produce evidence bearing on the individual defendant, not merely invoke the predicate conviction and present generalized recidivism statistics. The general studies may be relevant, but the constitutional question revolves around individualized dangerousness. General population-level evidence cannot by itself provide a basis for determining whether this person remains dangerous.
- The trial judge should make findings that permit meaningful appellate review. The findings should focus on historical factors with meaningful predictive value. An August 2024 Rand Research Brief concludes that time since the last conviction, current age, and number of prior convictions are the best reliable historical predictors. After Schadl, an Iowa district judge considering an as-applied challenge could reasonably want evidence concerning at least age; age at first offense; number and frequency of convictions; violence in the criminal history; time elapsed since the last offense; supervision failures; subsequent law-abiding behavior; and relevant dynamic factors such as substance abuse. That begins to turn “individualized present dangerousness” from an abstraction into something a trial court can articulate. The inquiry must focus on the defendant.
The appellate court here cited to social-science literature in discussing legislative facts. A trial judge, though, who is deciding whether the defendant remains dangerous is dealing with adjudicative facts. What adjudicative facts matter in assessing whether continued disarmament of a person can survive strict scrutiny? Is expert testimony required? Answers to these questions will evolve through future cases. The Iowa Supreme Court has articulated the constitutional principles, but the trial courts will develop the practical content of those principles through actual cases, evidentiary records, rulings, and findings.
