Split Seventh Circuit panel tangles with Second Amendment's second-class status and felon exclusion from right to bear arms

As noted in this post from last year, Justice Thomas has lamented in a cert denial that the Second Amendment has become "constitutional orphan" seemingly relegated in some settings to second-class status.  I have long thought this second-class status is demonstrated by the willingness of lower courts to uphold lifetime, blanket prohibitions on persons with certain criminal histories from being about to possess a gun.  The Seventh Circuit had another ruling in this arena last week in Kanter v. Barr, No. 18-1478 (7th Cir.  March 15, 2019) (available here).  Here is how the majority opinion starts and concludes:

Rickey I. Kanter pleaded guilty to one count of mail fraud under 18 U.S.C. § 1341.  Due to his felony conviction, he is prohibited from possessing a firearm under both federal and Wisconsin law. At issue in this case is whether the felon dispossession statutes—18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(1) and Wis. Stat. § 941.29(1m)—violate the Second Amendment as applied to Kanter. Even if Kanter could bring an as-applied challenge, the government has met its burden of establishing that the felon dispossession statutes are substantially related to an important government interest. We therefore affirm the district court....

In sum, the government has established that the felon dispossession statutes are substantially related to the important governmental objective of keeping firearms away those convicted of serious crimes. Because Kanter was convicted of a serious federal felony for conduct broadly understood to be criminal, his challenge to the constitutionality of § 922(g)(1) is without merit.

New Circuit Judge Amy Coney Barrett, excitingly, takes her own thoughtful look at these issues in an extended scholarly opinion. Her dissenting opinion concludes this way: 

If the Second Amendment were subject to a virtue limitation, there would be no need for the government to produce — or for the court to assess — evidence that nonviolent felons have a propensity for dangerous behavior.  But Heller forecloses the “civic right” argument on which a virtue limitation depends.  And while both Wisconsin and the United States have an unquestionably strong interest in protecting the public from gun violence, they have failed to show, by either logic or data, cf. Skoien, 614 F.3d at 642, that disarming Kanter substantially advances that interest.  On this record, holding that the ban is constitutional as applied to Kanter does not “put[] the government through its paces,” see Williams, 616 F.3d at 692, but instead treats the Second Amendment as a “second-class right, subject to an entirely different body of rules than the other Bill of Rights guarantees,” McDonald v. City of Chicago, 561 U.S. 742, 780 (2010) (plurality opinion).  I therefore dissent.