US: SC upholds law banning people subject to restraining orders for domestic violence from owning guns

Washington, DC [US], June 22 : The US Supreme Court, in its decision on Friday, announced that the government can take guns away from people subject to restraining orders for domestic violence, The New York Times reported.
The court's decision amounted to a retreat from what had been an unbroken series of major rulings favouring gun rights that began in 2008, when the court first recognised an individual constitutional right to keep firearms in the home for self-defence.
In the 2022 decision, the court said that it was a right to carry guns outside the residence and announced a new test to check all sorts of gun control laws. That new test has sparked confusion in the lower courts, with some judges striking down laws that were mentioned in the books for years.
The decision was announced in a case, United States v Rahimi, which asked whether a Texas man could be prosecuted under federal law, making it a crime for people subject to domestic violence restraining orders to have guns. Chief Justice John G Roberts Jr, writing for the majority in the 8-to-1 decision, said that the response was yes and that Second Amendment rights have limits.
The chief justice wrote, "When a restraining order contains a finding that an individual poses a credible threat to the physical safety of an intimate partner, that individual may -- consistent with the Second Amendment -- be banned from possessing firearms while the order is in effect."
The chief justice added, "Since the founding, our nation's firearm laws have included provisions preventing individuals who threaten physical harm to others from misusing firearms."
Justice Clarence Thomas, the author of the majority opinion in the 2022 decision, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v Bruen, was the only one against the decision. Legal experts called the court's decision on Friday a victory for supporters of gun regulations.
Adam Winkler, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said, "This decision will make it much easier for gun laws to survive legal challenge." Winkler added, "Broadly, it sends a signal that the court's majority is not completely hostile to gun laws. Lower courts may feel they have more leeway to uphold gun laws in the future."
The decision in the Bruen case said gun laws are constitutional only if courts can find a historical analogue. However, that inquiry, Chief Justice Roberts wrote on Friday, does not need locating an exact match and can rather focus on broad principles.
He wrote, "The appropriate analysis involves considering whether the challenged regulation is consistent with the principles that underpin our regulatory tradition." Justice Thomas disagreed with the decision of the majority judges.
He wrote, "The court and government do not point to a single historical law revoking a citizen's Second Amendment right based on possible interpersonal violence."
Justice Thomas stated that the government has a better way to disarm dangerous people by prosecuting them for criminal violence. He noted that what the government cannot do, is to "strip the Second Amendment right of anyone subject to a protective order, even if he has never been accused or convicted of a crime."
The court's three liberal members, who had disagreed in the Bruen case, wrote that they continued to think that the decision was a grave error. However, they said that they were happy to embrace the new limits.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justice Elena Kagan, welcomed the court's decision, calling it the clarification of the Bruen standard. She wrote that "the court's interpretation permits a historical inquiry calibrated to reveal something useful and transferable to the present day, while the dissent would make the historical inquiry so exacting as to be useless, a too-sensitive alarm that sounds whenever a regulation did not exist in an essentially identical form at the founding."
Justice Sotomayor further said that Justice Thomas's analysis will have a perverse result. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in her own concurrence, said the Bruen decision had left lower courts in a state of deep confusion. She wrote that chief justice's majority decision was "a tacit admission that lower courts are struggling."
She further said, "In my view, the blame may lie with us, not with them." The case started in 2019 when a drug dealer in Texas, Zackey Rahimi, assaulted his girlfriend and threatened to shoot her if she told anyone, leading her to obtain a restraining order. The court's order has suspended Rahimi's handgun licence and stopped him from possessing firearms.
According to court records, Rahimi defied the order in flagrant fashion. He threatened a different woman with a gun, resulting in charges of assault with a deadly weapon. He opened fire in public five times in two months, The New York Times reported.
For instance, he shot an AR-15 rifle into his former client's home as he was upset over a social media post from someone to whom he had sold drugs. He fired several bullets into the air after a fast-food restaurant declined a friend's credit card.
Following the shootings, a search warrant was issued for Rahimi's residence, which uncovered weapons, and he was charged with violating a federal law that makes it a crime for people subject to domestic violence orders to possess guns.
After a judge rejected his Second Amendment challenge to the law, Rahimi pleaded guilty and was sentenced to over six years in prison. The US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit at first affirmed his conviction in a short decision and rejected the argument that the law violated the Second Amendment in a footnote. However, the appeals court reversed course in 2023, a year after the apex court decided Bruen case.
It rejected various old laws identified by the government as possible analogues, saying they did not sufficiently resemble the one concerning domestic violence orders.
Judge Cory T Wilson, who was appointed by former US President Donald Trump, wrote that the government's insistence that it could disarm people who did not abide law "admits to no true limiting principle," The New York Times reported.
He asked, "Could speeders be stripped of their right to keep and bear arms?" He questioned, "Political nonconformists? People who do not recycle or drive an electric vehicle?"
Judge Wilson said that the federal law at issue in the case "embodies salutary policy goals meant to protect vulnerable people in our society." However, he noted that the approach required by the Bruen decision did not permit courts to consider the benefits of the law against its burdens. Quoting the decision, he wrote that what was significant was that "our ancestors would never have accepted" the law on domestic violence orders.
Chief Justice Roberts wrote that old laws required people suspected of future misbehaviour to give surety bonds and ones barring going armed to inculcate fear, among others were sufficiently analogous to the domestic violence law.
He wrote, "Taken together, the surety and going armed laws confirm what common sense suggests: When an individual poses a clear threat of physical violence to another, the threatening individual may be disarmed," adding that the challenged modern law "is by no means identical to these founding era regimes, but it does not need to be," The New York Times reported.
The chief justice called court's opinion "modest." While concluding his decision, Chief Justice Roberts wrote,"only this: An individual found by a court to pose a credible threat to the physical safety of another may be temporarily disarmed consistent with the Second Amendment."
The three justices appointed by Donald Trump each filed concurring opinions, musing on the scope of the majority's approach and how originalism ought to work in practice.
The Fifth Circuit, which ruled for Rahimi, is dominated by Republican appointees and has issued a series of conservative rulings that have met a frosty reception at the Supreme Court. In the case's ruling on Friday, Chief Justice Roberts said the appeals court's decision was an exercise in "slaying a straw man."