Why a Dismissal Does Not Give You Your Gun Rights Back

This is the question we get asked the most, and it has an answer people do not want to hear: in California, a standard dismissal does not restore your right to own or possess a firearm. Here is exactly why, and what the narrow real options actually are.

Updated October 10, 2026

If someone is telling you an expungement will get your gun rights back, read the statute with us, because it says the opposite, in plain words, for both of the two most common forms of relief people ask about.

What the law actually says

That sentence exists inside the same statute that grants the dismissal in the first place. Lawmakers anticipated the exact question people ask and answered it directly: the dismissal and the firearm prohibition are separate questions, and granting one does not touch the other.

Proposition 47, which lets certain felonies be resentenced or redesignated as misdemeanors, has the identical rule. Under Penal Code § 1170.18(j), a felony that is recalled and resentenced, or redesignated as a misdemeanor, is treated as a misdemeanor “for all purposes,” except that the statute specifically carves out firearms: the redesignation “shall not permit that person to own, possess, or have in their custody or control a firearm.” Two different relief statutes, two different circumstances, and the same explicit no.

Why the law is built this way

California treats the firearm prohibition tied to a conviction as a separate legal question from whether the underlying case gets dismissed. A felony conviction generally triggers a lifetime firearm prohibition. Certain misdemeanor convictions trigger a ten-year prohibition under Penal Code § 29805, covering offenses including several assault and battery provisions, brandishing a weapon, certain domestic violence and child endangerment convictions, specified weapons-carrying offenses, and others listed in the statute. None of that prohibition is undone just because the underlying case was later dismissed under § 1203.4 or reclassified under Proposition 47 -- the dismissal changes the conviction's legal status for most purposes, but the legislature chose to exclude firearms from “most purposes” by name.

Examples of the ten-year misdemeanor list

Penal Code § 29805 does not cover every misdemeanor -- it names specific categories. Among the offenses it lists are certain assault and battery convictions, brandishing a weapon, making criminal threats, and a number of specified weapons-carrying violations, along with others named directly in the statute. If you are unsure whether a particular misdemeanor on your record falls on this list, that is a question worth asking an attorney directly rather than assuming either way, since the list is specific rather than a general category.

It is also worth being clear about what a dismissal does accomplish here, even though it does not touch firearm rights: it still removes most other penalties and disabilities tied to the conviction, and it still carries the employment protections discussed in our guide on background checks. The firearm question is a narrow exception inside a dismissal that otherwise does a great deal. The mistake is assuming the exception does not exist, not assuming the dismissal does nothing at all.

What can actually matter for gun rights

There are a small number of real paths, and none of them is a routine dismissal. This is also a fact-specific area where the right move genuinely depends on your exact conviction, so treat this as an overview, not a conclusion about your own case.

• The ten-year misdemeanor prohibition under Penal Code § 29805 expires on its own, by its own terms, once ten years have passed from the conviction -- assuming nothing else extends or restarts it.
• A Penal Code § 17(b) reduction of a wobbler felony to a misdemeanor can matter in some circumstances, because the felony firearm prohibition and the misdemeanor ten-year prohibition are different rules with different triggers and different lengths. A reduction does not automatically restore firearm rights, and some misdemeanors carry their own separate, sometimes lifetime, firearm restrictions.
• A full and unconditional pardon from the Governor, obtained through a Certificate of Rehabilitation (Penal Code § 4852.01 et seq.), is the one route in California law that can restore firearm rights to someone with a felony conviction. Penal Code § 4852.17 is explicit that this restoration does not happen if the person was ever convicted of a felony involving the use of a dangerous weapon -- that exception is written into the statute by name.

Why we are telling you this instead of a hopeful version

Firearm rights are one of the clearest places in this entire area of law where overclaiming happens, because it is the question people most want a yes to. The statutes themselves do not leave room for a softer answer. If restoring your firearm rights is the actual goal -- not just clearing a conviction in general -- that is a different, narrower legal question than a standard dismissal, and it deserves to be asked and answered as its own question, with your specific conviction history in front of an attorney, rather than assumed as a side effect of something else.

If you came to this page because someone told you a dismissal would fix this, the useful next step is not to give up on the idea of relief altogether -- it is to ask a narrower, more honest question: which of the specific routes above, if any, actually applies to your exact conviction history and how much time has already passed. That is a fact-specific analysis, and it is one worth getting a straight answer to before you spend money assuming an outcome the statute itself rules out.

Legal information on this page was last checked against primary sources in October 2026. California law changes; if you are reading this long after that date, confirm before you rely on it.