I would add to my previous statement that the situation regarding felons and firearms isn't totally separate from the situation regarding the mentally ill and firearms ownership. Just like we don't want legitimate criminals having weapons, we also don't want the legitimately mentally ill having them either.
However, this is a highly precarious proposition because enforcement requires allowing the government to define who is a criminal and who is mentally ill. When significant portions of the population begin to fall into these categories we know something is up. It's a very slippery slope because the definitions of "felon" and "mental illness" get broader every year. Things that any sane person wouldn't even regard as a crime (like packing lobster tails in cardboard boxes) are now felonies, and what used to be described as a funk is now diagnosed as major clinical bipolar depression.
If you want to know the truth of the matter, anyone on this forum, indeed anyone in this country, no matter how sane and law abiding, could be convicted of a felony or mentally adjudicated. It's only a matter of someone taking the time to nail you, or just being unlucky (as in the case of Mr. Huang). This is a serious problem. Historically speaking, it's a tried and proven method used by oppressive governments to suppress dissent and take away the rights of anyone who they perceive as a threat. Much of Eastern Europe operated this way under the Iron Curtain. Anyone who was inconvenient could be arrested at any time on trumped up charges and have their rights and freedoms curtailed. The idea is to turn everyone into criminals with an impossible legal code, then selectively enforce it. The result is state sponsored criminality run amok, juxtaposed with brutal punishment for the smallest of offenses for anyone who steps outside the line.
Additionally, this technique also requires that the legal code be designed to force people into criminal behavior. You end up with conflicting, mutually exclusive laws, where following one law requires breaking another. Or the laws are simply so restrictive that you have to bend the rules in order just to get by. North Korea is a prime example of that. They allow certain commercial activities in order to keep people from starving, but the fact remains that anyone could be arrested at any time for operating a for profit business. They run little produce stands in rural markets and everyone participates out of necessity, but any targeted individual can be picked up at any time, charged, then sent off to prison.
We here in the US are not too far off from having such a system, and if something major doesn't change we will eventually get there, where the law is so burdensome it must necessarily be broken just to get by. The environmental regulations alone are about to put farming and industry into bankruptcy, and will eventually make even a home garden or small business virtually impossible to run profitably while following every regulation on the books. We are probably to that point already and just don't fully realize it yet. I would imagine the EPA could shut down every family farm, garden, and small business in the country under our current laws if they just had the manpower to do it.
The point here though is that taking away someone's ability to appeal to have their rights restored is a major step in that direction. In fact, I would say it's the major obstacle currently in the way of using our legal system to systematically take away the rights of honest people who have done nothing wrong, other than having fallen into the legal quicksand and having technically broken the law. If we remove this right to appeal, it's kind of like giving the go ahead to start using the legal system to persecute political enemies and remove rights that are inconvenient to the state.