In their first Second Amendment case, as they expanded gun rights In 2022, the justices ruled 8-1 in favor of the 1994 handgun ban. banned people stay away from your spouses or partners. The justices overturned a decision by a federal appeals court in New Orleans that struck down the law.
Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the court, said the law is based on “common sense” and applies only “after a judge determines that a person poses a credible threat” of physical violence.
Justice Clarence Thomas, author of the landmark 2022 Bruen decision in the New York case, dissented.
President Joe Biden, who has criticized previous Supreme Court decisions on guns, abortion and other hot-button issues, praised the result.
“No one who has been assaulted should have to worry about their abuser getting a gun,” Biden said in a statement. “As a result of today’s ruling, victims of domestic violence and their families will continue to have the critical protections they have enjoyed for the past three decades.”
Inventory increase is acceptable
Last week, a court overturned a Trump-era ban on… raise sharesaccessories for rapid fire weapons used in deadliest mass shooting in modern US history. The court ruled that the Department of Justice exceeded its authority by imposing this ban.
Friday’s case directly stems from the Supreme Court’s June 2022 decision in Bruen. Texas man Zaki Rahimi was accused of hitting his girlfriend during an argument in a parking lot and then threatening to shoot her.
During arguments in November, some justices expressed concern that a ruling against Rahimi could also jeopardize a background check system that the Biden administration says has stopped more than 75,000 gun sales over the past 25 years based on domestic violence protective orders.
The case has also been closely watched for its potential impact on cases that have questioned other gun laws, including a high-profile case. prosecution of Hunter Biden. Biden’s son was found guilty of lying on a form to buy a firearm while addicted to drugs. His lawyers have indicated they will appeal.
Cancellation decision domestic violence The gun law could also signal the court’s skepticism of other laws. But Friday’s decision doesn’t mean the court will necessarily uphold that law either.
The justices may soon weigh in on one or more of these cases.
Many gun law cases stem from the Bruen decision. This Supreme Court decision not only expanded Americans’ rights to guns under the Constitution, but also changed the way courts must evaluate gun restrictions.
Roberts: History is on our side
In his opinion, Roberts turned to history. “Since our founding, our nation’s firearms laws have included provisions prohibiting individuals who threaten physical harm to others from misusing firearms,” he wrote.
Roberts writes that some courts have gone too far in their handling of Bruen and other gun rights cases. “These precedents did not suggest that the law was locked in amber,” he wrote.
In dissent, Thomas wrote, the law “denies a person’s ability to own firearms and ammunition without any due process of law.”
The government “has failed to provide any evidence” that the law is consistent with the country’s historical tradition of regulating firearms, he wrote.
“No historical regulation justifies the law in question,” Thomas wrote.
Seven of the nine justices wrote 94-page opinions in the gun case, largely focusing on the proper use of history in weighing gun restrictions and other restrictions on constitutional rights.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that Roberts’ opinion “allows for historical research calculated to reveal something useful and transferable to the present day, whereas a dissent would render historical research so precise as to render it useless.” She was among three liberal justices to dissent in Bruen’s case.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who was part of Bruen’s majority, noted that the court will likely hear many more gun rights cases because “Second Amendment jurisprudence is in its early stages of development.” It was not until 2008 that the court declared for the first time that the Constitution protects the individual’s right to keep and bear arms.
Five executions in two months
Rahimi’s case reached the Supreme Court after prosecutors appealed a decision overturning his conviction for possessing a weapon while under a restraining order.
Rahimi was involved in five shootings over two months in and around Arlington, U.S. District Judge Corey Wilson noted. When police identified Rahimi as the suspect in the shooting and went to his home with a search warrant, he admitted that he had guns in the house and that he was subject to a domestic violence restraining order that prohibited him from owning guns, Wilson wrote.
But even though Rahimi was hardly a “model citizen,” Wilson wrote, the law in question cannot be justified from a historical perspective. This is precisely the test he believed Justice Thomas proposed to the court in Bruen.
The Court of Appeal initially upheld the sentence, taking into account a balancing test that included whether the restriction enhances public safety. But after Bruen, the commission changed course. At least one district court upheld the law following the Bruen decision.
Following the ruling, Attorney General Merrick Garland said the Justice Department “will continue to enforce this important law, which has helped protect victims and survivors of domestic violence from their abusers for nearly 30 years.”
“As the Department of Justice has argued and as the Court affirmed today, this common-sense ban is entirely consistent with the Court’s precedent and the text and history of the Second Amendment,” Garland said in a statement.
Advocates for domestic violence victims and gun control groups urged the court to uphold the law.
Firearms are the most common weapon used in killings of spouses, intimate partners, children or relatives in recent years, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Guns were used in more than half (57%) of homicides in 2020, which saw an overall increase in domestic violence during the coronavirus pandemic.
According to the gun control group Everytown for Gun Safety, an average of seventy women a month are shot and killed by intimate partners.
Gun rights groups backed Rahimi, arguing that the appeals court did the right thing by looking at American history and finding no restrictions serious enough to justify a gun ban.
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Associated Press writers Fatima Hussain, Alanna Durkin Richer and Lindsay Whitehurst contributed to this report.