On April 2, the Seventh Circuit issued an opinion affirming the dismissal of a Second Amendment challenge to the state of Wisconsin’s denial of a concealed carry permit to an applicant who had received a court martial for distributing peyote. The petitioner, Mr. Karwacki, served in the U.S. armed forces. After being court martialed for the peyote distribution, he received a bad-conduct discharge. He later applied for a concealed carry permit in Wisconsin. Wisconsin denied his application pursuant to Wis. Stat. § 941.29(1m)(b), which prohibits the possession of firearms by a person who “has been convicted of a crime elsewhere that would be a felony if committed in this state.” And because delivering or distributing peyote is a felony in Wisconsin, Karwacki’s application was denied.
Karwacki challenged Wisconsin’s decision as invalid under the Second Amendment and the Full Faith and Credit Clause, Art. IV § 1. The Full Faith and Credit Clause provides:
Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State. And the Congress may by general Laws prescribe the Manner in which such Acts, Records and Proceedings shall be proved, and the Effect thereof.
Karwacki argued that because the court martial called his offense a misdemeanor, Wisconsin denied that decision Full Faith and Credit when it deemed the offense to be a felony for purposes of his concealed carry permit application. The Seventh Circuit, in an opinion written by Judge Easterbrook, disagreed:
[A] federal court martial is not a “judicial Proceeding[ in any] other State”. . . . Nor has Congress enacted a statute, parallel to 28 U.S.C. § 1738, specifying what consequences a court martial’s decision must or may have in the states.
What is more, we do not see how Wisconsin has deprived the court martial’s decision of “Full Faith and Credit” in any sense. The tribunal sentenced Karwacki to a bad-conduct discharge; Wisconsin has not tried to deprive that ruling of its effect. The main function of this Clause is to ensure that judgments retain their primary effects, often via rules of issue or claim preclusion.
The denial of Karwacki’s concealed carry application is not a matter of properly implementing the court martial conviction, the Court explained, but rather a simple matter of the collateral consequences that conviction carries. Wisconsin, like every other state, simply “identifies domestic consequences of convictions in other jurisdictions.” The Full Faith and Credit Clause does not prohibit states from doing so.
As to the Second Amendment challenge, the Court explained that given Karwacki’s conviction for distributing a controlled substance, the well-established relationship between drug distribution and gun violence, and the government’s ability to “disarm individuals who present a credible threat to the physical safety of others” (quoting Rahimi), Karwacki’s Second Amendment challenge likewise fails.
The opinion does not undertake the Bruen two-step inquiry; citing instead to two reported Second Amendment-related opinions that the Seventh Circuit released the same day—United States v. Prince, No. 23-3155 (7th Cir.), and United States v. Watson, No. 24-2432 (7th Cir.).
The Full Faith and Credit issue, which I covered in February, is not likely to go away anytime soon. It highlights a tension between states as independent sovereigns—as laboratories of experimentation—and as equals within a federal system. Here, Wisconsin has defined specific conduct that it deems disqualifying for purposes of concealed carry. Wisconsin law may attach more severe consequences to Karwacki’s court martial than its neighboring states, for example. And that’s just a consequence of federalism. But if each state was required to recognize the concealed carry permits of other states, the fear is that the least restrictive standard, the lowest common denominator, becomes the prevailing standard for all 50 states. This result contradicts the commonly held values of federalism, including by subjecting us to the legislative whims of officials whom we did not elect from states in which we do not live.
There is a public policy exception to the Full Faith & Credit clause, wherein a state’s strongly held public policy interests can override the application of another state’s law. This was true in Nevada v. Hall, in which the Court upheld a lower court’s refusal to apply Nevada statutory damages cap for a pending case in California state court. It’s important that this exception has been applied in choice of law contexts, but we haven’t seen courts sanctioning the use of the exception to ignore another state’s judgment or the result of judicial proceedings. As I explained in my prior post about Full Faith & Credit, caselaw provides no clear answer on the interstate recognition of concealed carry permits.
There is a pending cert petition before the U.S. Supreme Court that raises Full Faith and Credit challenge to Maryland’s non-recognition of a valid Virginia concealed carry permit. That case is Gardner v. Maryland. The Court is considering that petition at next conference on April 17. Several amicus briefs have been filed in support of petitioner, including from Senator Cruz, the Solicitor General and Attorney General of Virginia (filed under the previous administration, which left office in January), the CATO institute, and others.
The Westlaw citation for Karwacki v. Kaul is 2026 WL 905431.
