Supreme Court Says Domestic Abusers Can Be Denied Guns

WASHINGTON—An 8-1 Supreme Court upheld a federal law that forbids domestic abusers from possessing guns, ruling Friday that the Second Amendment permits temporarily disarming people found to pose a threat to others.

The case was the first major test of the conservative majority’s new approach to gun rights, laid out in a 2022 opinion declaring that weapons regulations can pass muster only if they are analogous to those familiar to Americans of the founding era some 250 years ago.

Writing for the court, Chief Justice John Roberts said that while gun laws must be consistent with historical examples, it was a mistake to conclude that weapons regulations must be “trapped in amber.” For centuries, he wrote, English and American law had permitted disarming people judged as threats to public safety.

Only Justice Clarence Thomas, who wrote the 2022 opinion expanding Second Amendment protections, dissented. “Not a single historical regulation justifies the statute at issue,” he said.

The ruling reverses a federal appeals court in New Orleans that invalidated a 1994 federal law denying firearms to people under domestic-violence restraining orders. The Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reasoned that such measures were unknown in the founding era.

The case centered on Zackey Rahimi, who hadn’t been convicted of a crime when a Texas court placed him under a restraining order after he assaulted his girlfriend in a parking lot and shot at a bystander who witnessed it.

Rahimi continued to fire weapons, including shooting in the air at a fast-food drive through, after being placed under the restraining order, leading to his conviction under the 1994 law.

On appeal to the Supreme Court, the Justice Department argued that the Second Amendment never had been understood to provide dangerous people a right to firearms.

The 1994 “law protects victims by keeping firearms out of the hands of dangerous individuals who pose a threat to their intimate partners and children,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said Friday. “That commonsense prohibition is entirely consistent with the court’s precedent and the text and history of the Second Amendment.”

The Justice Department had said the presence of a gun in a household with a domestic abuser increases the risk of homicide fivefold.

The high court’s 2022 decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen fundamentally changed how courts are expected to judge the constitutionality of gun laws, emphasizing the importance of historical evidence over modern public-safety rationales. That 6-3 decision has sparked new types of litigation over gun restrictions where lawyers are plumbing historical accounts to find 18th-century analogies to their present-day legal positions. The Rahimi case was seen as an opportunity for the court to clarify the elements necessary to affirm a weapons regulation today.

Rahimi’s lawyer, federal public defender Matthew Wright, argued that taking weapons away from people who haven’t been convicted of a crime, even if a judge believes they are domestic abusers, infringed a constitutional right. Instead of such preventive orders, authorities should “prosecute and jail people who commit violence,” Rahimi’s brief argued.

Wright didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Write to Jess Bravin at [email protected]