The Supreme Court has found a gun-control measure it likes
HARD CASES make bad law, warned Oliver Wendell Holmes junior, an early-20th-century justice. Cases reaching America’s Supreme Court often pose tricky, even wrenching, dilemmas. But after 90 minutes of oral argument on November 7th, a case testing the boundaries of the court’s recent expansion of gun rights looked unexpectedly easy to resolve.
United States v Rahimi involves Zackey Rahimi, a 23-year-old Texan whose girlfriend was granted a protective order in 2020 two months after Mr Rahimi assaulted her in a parking lot. The couple had been squabbling over custody of their child when Mr Rahimi knocked his girlfriend to the ground, dragged her to his car and pushed her inside. He then shot at an eyewitness and, later, threatened to shoot his girlfriend if she told anyone what he had done. The restraining order came with a suspension of his handgun licence and a caution that federal law prohibited him from possessing a gun. Mr Rahimi did not heed the warning. He shot at several drivers, used an AR-15 to fire into the house of a man to whom he had sold drugs and shot at a fast-food restaurant.
In March, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals found that while Mr Rahimi may not be a “model citizen” he is “nonetheless among ‘the people’ entitled to the Second Amendment’s guarantees”. Drawing on the test in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v Bruen, the Supreme Court’s gun-rights ruling from 2022, the Fifth Circuit searched for a historical analogue to the federal ban on firearms for domestic abusers under restraining orders. Finding no such match—not surprisingly, given that domestic abuse was not on the founders’ list of scourges in 1791—America’s most conservative appellate court found the federal law unconstitutional.
2023-11-09 09:01:38
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