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“The Supreme Court on Friday upheld a federal law that bars anyone subject to a domestic-violence restraining order from possessing a gun. By a vote of 8-1, the court ruled that the law does not violate the Constitution’s Second Amendment… The ruling in United States v. Rahimi was the court’s first Second Amendment case since it threw out New York’s handgun-licensing scheme nearly two years ago. In that case, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, the majority emphasized that courts should uphold gun restrictions only when there is a tradition of such regulation in U.S. history.” SCOTUSblog
Both sides generally agree with the outcome of the case:
“The Rahimi decision will affect many pending challenges to gun regulations. For example, there is a federal law, and there are laws in almost every state, that prohibit convicted felons from having guns. Hundreds of challenges to these laws have been mounted in the last two years, and lower courts are split as to whether the regulations violate the 2nd Amendment. Now there is a strong basis for upholding them…
“There is no doubt that the current conservative majority of the court is supportive of gun rights, as reflected in last week’s decision striking down a federal regulation that outlawed bump stocks, devices that allow a rifle to function like a machine gun. That makes the decision in Rahimi especially important. The 8-1 verdict emphatically upholds the government’s power to regulate guns to protect safety and save innocent lives.”
Erwin Chemerinsky, Los Angeles Times
“Justice Clarence Thomas, who wrote the majority opinion in Bruen, provided the sole dissent. In his view, ‘Not a single historical regulation justifies the statute at issue.’ He is certainly correct that, while interpersonal violence is a problem that governments have confronted since time immemorial, a gun ban for domestic abusers under restraining orders is a recent innovation. Neither surety bonds nor going-armed laws are all that similar to it…
“But Justice Thomas’s observation highlights a problem with Bruen rather than Rahimi. As Justice Amy Coney Barrett notes in her concurring opinion [Friday], an overly demanding scavenger hunt test assumes ‘that founding-era legislatures maximally exercised their power to regulate.’ If they declined to enact a given gun regulation, the logic goes, then the Constitution must prohibit it—a striking logical leap… The Rahimi majority is wise to loosen that assumption.”
Robert VerBruggen, City Journal
Other opinions below.
“Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justice Elena Kagan, celebrated the majority’s focus on ‘principles’ instead of perfect analogs. ‘History has a role to play in Second Amendment analysis,’ she wrote, ‘but a rigid adherence to history, (particularly history predating the inclusion of women and people of color as full members of the polity), impoverishes constitutional interpretation and hamstrings our democracy.’…
“All three liberals sound ready and willing to overturn Bruen altogether if they get the chance—but will, for now, settle for Rahimi’s compromise.”
Mark Joseph Stern, Slate
“[Justice Thomas] couldn’t find anything exactly like a ban on firearms possession by violent spouse-beating thugs in America’s early history and argued the statute should fall. But the other eight justices shrank from this scandalous position…
“[Yet at the same time three justices] wrote concurrences that made it clear they would not tolerate any further backsliding on gun rights, essentially arguing that the Rahimi situation was the exception that proved the general rule that the Second Amendment reigns supreme in the constitutional scheme…
“So while the finding in Rahimi should be welcomed as good news for domestic-violence victims and as an indication this Court (other than Justice Thomas) won’t embrace the most radically absolutist views of the Second Amendment, it’s only worth two cheers.”
Ed Kilgore, New York Magazine
“The Rahimi case is a clear illustration of the problem with Bruen: judges don’t know where to start or what they’re looking for when they’re told to consult the past. There are five concurring opinions, each with a distinct view on how to go about that task. In one, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson describes a ‘mad scramble for historical records,’ being weighed by jurists not trained in archival work.”
Amy Davidson Sorkin, New Yorker
“I’m inclined to think the majority was right that the Founders saw dangerousness as the touchstone of the limits on the right to bear arms, and that the Founding-era precedent of the surety laws is close enough to show that a civil process for finding dangerousness can be used to restrict the right to bear arms — although, as Gorsuch observed, that leaves open not only the due-process questions but also the duration of those orders…
“Thomas closed with a reminder of what our system really gets wrong about domestic violence, which is why we are often stuck with half measures and patchwork fixes in coping with the wife-beaters who walk amongst us. ‘States have a ready mechanism for disarming anyone who uses a firearm to threaten physical violence: criminal prosecution.’… Until we start treating domestic violence as a real crime, we’re going to keep having these arguments.”
Dan McLaughlin, National Review
“However one regards the court’s analysis, it remains the case that the conclusion at which the Fifth Circuit arrived was not that domestic violence used to be okay, so it’s okay now. Rather, it concluded that the United States has no tradition of completely removing the right to keep and bear arms from discrete individuals without a criminal conviction in hand. Ultimately, this was a due process question, and that is not changed by the fact that, in this particular instance, the accusations against the individual at hand are harrowing.”
Charles C. W. Cooke, National Review
“Most significantly going forward, there’s a fascinating interplay among the separate concurrences of Justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett—the three Trump appointees—about the nature of originalism and what a text/structure/history approach means for jurisprudence… It all shows that originalism is a rigorous intellectual enterprise, not some post-hoc rationalization for conservative outcomes as its bad-faith critics allege.”
Ilya Shapiro, Manhattan Institute
