Supreme Court hears Major Guns case involving domestic violence
The Supreme Court on Friday agreed to consider whether the government could ban people subject to domestic violence orders from having guns, paving the way for a major test of its ruling last year, which upheld people’s right to public arming was greatly expanded.
The case will revolve around the scope of a new legal standard established in that decision, one whose reliance on historical practices has created confusion across the country as courts have struggled to enforce it.
It comes as the nation struggles to deal with a seemingly endless series of mass shootings and other gun violence.
The Supreme Court has made only two major Second Amendment decisions since 2008, when it established an individual right to keep guns in the home for self-defense in District of Columbia v. Heller. Two years later, in McDonald v. Chicago, the court extended the Heller decision, which related to federal gun laws, to state and local laws.
More than a decade of silence followed, with the court rejecting numerous appeals against decisions upholding gun control laws, to the frustration of some of its conservative members. The arrival of three judges appointed by President Donald J. Trump, who established a conservative supermajority, changed the calculus.
In last year New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, the court, by a vote of 6 to 3, struck down a New York law that placed strict restrictions on carrying guns outdoors. The rationale of the ruling was just as important as its outcome.
The majority opinion, authored by Judge Clarence Thomas, heralded a new benchmark by which courts must now judge restrictions on gun rights, turning to early U.S. history as a guide: “Government must demonstrate that regulation is consistent with the historical tradition of this country of firearm regulation.”
The constitutionality of modern gun control measures, he wrote, depends on whether there were analogous laws in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Justice Thomas acknowledged that the new standard was imprecise.
“Analogical reasoning only requires the government to identify an established and representative historian analogno historical twinJudge Thomas wrote. “So even if a modern ordinance isn’t a dead end for historical precursors, it may still be analogous enough to pass constitutional scrutiny.”
In March, a unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans said the new standard requires the scrap a federal law prohibiting people subject to domestic violence orders from owning firearms because there was no historical support for it.
The case, United States v Rahimi, No. 22-915, involved Zackey Rahimi, a Texas drug dealer with a history of gun violence, according to court records. In 2019, Mr. Rahimi assaulted his girlfriend and threatened to shoot her if she told anyone, resulting in her getting a restraining order. The order suspended Mr. Rahimi’s gun license and prohibited him from owning firearms.
He threatened another woman with a gun, leading to charges of assault with a deadly weapon. He then opened fire five times in public in two months.
Angry about a social media post from someone he sold drugs to, for example, he shot an AR-15 rifle into his former client’s home. When a fast food restaurant declined a friend’s credit card, he fired several bullets into the air.
The shootings led to a search warrant of Mr. Rahimi’s home, uncovering weapons, and accusing him of violating federal law.
After a judge dismissed his challenge to the Second Amendment law, he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to more than six years in prison. The Fifth Circuit initially affirmed his conviction in a short decisiondismissing the argument that the law violated the Second Amendment in a footnote.
But the appeals court reverse course following Bruen’s decision last June.
The Fifth Circuit rejected a variety of ancient laws identified by the government as possible historical analogs, saying they were not sufficiently similar to those regarding domestic violence orders. Many of them, Judge Cory T. Wilson wrote for the panel, “disarmed classes of people considered dangerous, especially those unwilling to take an oath of allegiance, slaves and Native Americans.” That was different, he wrote, from warrants to domestic violence, which judge on a case-by-case basis the dangerousness of a particular individual.
Judge Wilson, who was appointed by Trump, wrote that the administration’s insistence on being able to disarm people who break the law “does not admit any real restrictive principle”.
“Can speeders be deprived of their right to keep and bear arms?” he asked. “Political Nonconformists? People who don’t recycle or drive electrically?”
Judge Wilson acknowledged that the federal law at issue in the case “embodies beneficial policy goals designed to protect vulnerable people in our society.” But he said the approach required by the Bruen decision did not allow courts to weigh the benefits of the law against its burdens. What was significant, he wrote, citing that decision, was that “our ancestors would never have accepted” the domestic violence law.
Judge James C. Howho was also appointed by Mr. Trump, issued a concurring opinion saying there were other ways to protect victims of domestic violence.
“Those who perpetrate violence, including domestic violence,” he wrote, “should not simply be disarmed – they should be detained, prosecuted, convicted and imprisoned. And that’s exactly why we have a criminal justice system – to punish criminals and deter them from committing further crimes.”
But Judge Ho said domestic violence orders were products of the civil justice system and subject to abuse.
That makes it difficult to justify the law Mr Rahimi challenged, he wrote, “as a measure to disarm dangerous individuals.”
Justice Stephen G. Breyer, who dissented last year in the Bruen case, wrote that the new test asked judges to perform unfamiliar tasks.
Judges are not historians, wrote Judge Breyer, who retired a few days later. “Legal experts typically have little experience answering disputed historical questions or applying those answers to solve contemporary problems,” he wrote.