Sixth Circuit Rejects Challenge to Mental Health Gun Ban

Last updated November 2026 · By Nick Hall, tracks federal and state firearms policy daily for USA Gun Shop readers, including every Bruen challenge to Section 922(g)

Quick take: The Sixth Circuit ruled on October 29 that the federal gun ban for people adjudicated mentally ill or committed survives a facial Second Amendment challenge. It’s a narrow win for the government built on one defendant’s very bad facts, and it leaves the door open for people who recovered years ago.

• Ruling: A unanimous panel affirmed Alexander Laykovich’s conviction and 48-month sentence and held that 18 U.S.C. 922(g)(4) is not unconstitutional on its face.
• Court: Judge Murphy wrote for a Sixth Circuit panel with Judges Gibbons and Hermandorfer in United States v. Laykovich, No. 25-5766.
• Why it matters: The court dropped the older test it used in 2016 to side with a long-recovered Michigan man and replaced it with Bruen history.
• What’s next: As-applied challenges from people with old commitments are still open, and the ruling binds only Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee.

Most Bruen fights over the 922(g) list are about drugs or old felonies, and the courts keep splitting them into smaller pieces. This one is about mental illness, and the facts could not have been worse for the challenger. I read all 29 pages of the opinion, so here is what it holds and where it stops.

Table of Contents

How Laykovich Got Here

Early on January 25, 2024, a sheriff’s deputy pulled over a car that kept swerving near Stanford, Kentucky. The driver, Laykovich, was wearing body armor and a body camera. A search turned up eight firearms, including two rifles, plus a large amount of ammunition, knives, a gasoline can, marijuana and a pill containing fentanyl.

He told police he was headed to Fort Knox “to discuss a security clearance matter.” The FBI treated it as a narrowly “averted mass casualty event,” and a later search of his storage unit in Wisconsin found fifteen more firearms and two boxes of explosive devices.

The gun ban came from a year earlier. In January 2023, after an episode in St. Louis, a Missouri court ordered him involuntarily hospitalized for 21 days, finding he might cause “serious harm to himself or to others” because of his mental illness. The court also barred him from possessing firearms.

Laykovich pleaded guilty in the Eastern District of Kentucky to violating 922(g)(4) and kept his right to appeal the constitutional question. Judge Karen K. Caldwell sentenced him to 48 months, inside a guidelines range of 46 to 57 months, after finding his girlfriend had bought eight of the guns for him once a store refused to sell to him.

Why the Sixth Circuit Upheld the Mental Health Gun Ban

The published opinion, decided October 29, 2026, starts with the statute. 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(4) bars anyone “who has been adjudicated as a mental defective or who has been committed to a mental institution” from possessing firearms. Laykovich argued it is unconstitutional on its face, which is the hardest challenge to win. He had to show the law can’t be applied constitutionally to anyone.

He couldn’t, the court said, because it can be applied constitutionally to him. Judge Murphy walked through English and colonial law and founding-era statutes in New York, Virginia, Connecticut and Massachusetts that let officials lock up people whose mental illness made them dangerous. Locked up meant no guns.

Under Bruen, the modern law only has to be “relevantly similar” to those historical rules, and the panel found it was on both the why and the how. Both protect the public. Both need a court or official decision first. For Laykovich, both last only until the person recovers, and disarmament is a lighter burden than being chained in an asylum.

The rule the court actually adopted is narrow. In its words, “the government may legally detain (and so effectively disarm) those who have been adjudicated a present risk to public safety due to their mental illness.” It specifically declined to adopt a broader rule that the government can disarm anyone it deems dangerous.

The Tyler Problem, and Why It Matters

This isn’t the first time the Sixth Circuit has looked at 922(g)(4). In 2016, the en banc court heard Tyler v. Hillsdale County Sheriff’s Department, brought by Clifford Tyler, a Michigan man committed for a few weeks in 1986 during a contentious divorce who showed no signs of mental illness in the decades after. The lead opinion, by Judge Gibbons, used means-ends scrutiny and found a permanent ban with no way back didn’t fit him.

Bruen threw out means-ends scrutiny in 2022. So the Laykovich panel said plainly that “Tyler’s mode of analysis no longer binds us.” Judge Gibbons, the author of that lead opinion, signed on.

But the panel was careful to separate the two men. Tyler’s ban was “effectively permanent” under the law at the time. Laykovich can petition a Missouri court to lift his, and Congress lets the Attorney General grant relief under 18 U.S.C. 925(c), which the Justice Department reopened with a final rule published August 20, 2026. Our write-up of the DOJ rights restoration rule covers how that process works.

The court also took a shot at the Supreme Court’s favorite shortcut. Heller called bans on the “mentally ill” presumptively lawful, but the panel noted that “Mental illness is a broad concept that could cover everything from a severe case of schizophrenia to a mild case of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.” It gave that line weight but did not treat it as the answer.

What the Laykovich Ruling Does Not Do

It doesn’t settle as-applied challenges. The opinion says again and again that the ban is valid “at least as applied to Laykovich,” a man a court had found dangerous a year before he was caught heading to Fort Knox in armor. Someone with a decades-old commitment and a clean record since is a different case, and the court said so by distinguishing Tyler.

It doesn’t define “mental defective.” The opinion calls the phrase outdated and says neither side tried to define it. The ruling covers the part of 922(g)(4) that applied to Laykovich, a court finding of danger from mental illness.

It doesn’t reach outside the Sixth Circuit, which hears appeals from Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee. If you live in one of those states, our Kentucky gun laws guide and the other state pages cover the state-level rules that sit on top of the federal ban.

And it doesn’t touch the Supreme Court’s 2026 drug-user decision in United States v. Hemani, which the panel read as holding that at least some applications of 922(g)(3) fail Bruen. The difference, as the panel told it, is process and incapacity. A commitment order comes with a hearing. A drug habit doesn’t.

Getting Your Rights Back After a Commitment

If you’re federally prohibited under 922(g)(4), the practical road runs through your state first. The Justice Department’s relief page for 922(g)(4) says relief can come through a state relief-from-disability program, and it lists places with no such program, including Arkansas, Montana, New Hampshire and Wyoming.

The order matters. Under DOJ’s chart, if you are eligible for your state program and never applied, or your state application is pending or was denied, you are “presumptively disqualified from FFRR relief.” If a qualifying state program grants relief, DOJ says “You no longer have a prohibition under 922(g)(4).”

Laykovich had a state door and never knocked on it. He drove to Fort Knox instead. That’s the whole case.

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