On Friday, the highest court in the land issued its most consequential decision on gun control in two years, confirming a federal statute that prohibits the possession of firearms by those who are the targets of restraining orders related to domestic violence.
The judgment was a huge victory for victims of domestic violence and gun safety groups, with both liberals and conservatives joining the 8-1 majority. It curtailed a contentious criterion that conservatives on the high court had established in 2022, which stated that gun bans needed a historical basis to pass constitutional muster.
However, Chief Justice John Roberts’ majority ruling did not address important concerns regarding the circumstances under which the government can seize firearms from non-violent offenders.
The lawsuit revolved around a statute passed in 1994 that prohibits the possession of firearms by those who are the targets of restraining orders related to domestic abuse. The results of a string of shootings led to the conviction of Zackey Rahimi, a guy from Texas, for breaking that statute.
Some important points to remember from the ruling are these.
Returning to the past with firearms
For gun control legislation to stand the test of time, the Supreme Court ruled in the case of New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, which was decided two years ago. Because of this, subordinate courts have been hastily conducting historical studies to see whether or not contemporary gun restrictions can be traced back to the 18th century.
On Friday, however, the majority ruled that lower courts might sustain contemporary gun prohibitions without identifying precise copies of a prior statute. Just being in the ballpark is sufficient.
It is permissible to disarm a person “when an individual presents a clear threat of physical violence to another,” Roberts stated.
The relevant statute “is not required to be” similar to the statutes enacted during the foundation era, although it is far from being identical. Its ban on anyone deemed by a judge to be a danger to others possessing weapons “fits neatly within the tradition” of previous legislation.
Conservatives experimenting with
Despite the 8-1 result, the presence of five concurring opinions—including those of three conservative justices nominated by Trump who had previously supported the Bruen opinion—demonstrates that the court’s conservative faction is continuing to tweak the standard established in.
The majority’s statement in that decision was misunderstood by lower courts, according to Roberts’ opinion. However, liberal justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said that lower courts should have relied on the high court as it had not provided sufficient guidance.
The Trump-nominees for the Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, defended Bruen by saying that lower courts should stop using a “policy” approach to gun restrictions and instead look at the laws’ historical context. Before Bruen, courts frequently used a balancing approach that considered both the government’s public safety objectives and the alleged violation of the right to bear arms.
Several pages into his ostensible explanation of how courts should consider gun regulations enacted before and after the Constitution’s ratification, Kavanaugh argues that the “first stop” should be reviewing Supreme Court decisions.
In a brief concurrence, conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett criticized the practice of certain lower courts seeking almost equivalent past gun legislation in order to evaluate current rules. Barrett has recently voiced her displeasure with the Supreme Court’s approach to history.
“There are significant issues with imposing a test that requires extremely precise analogies,” Barrett stated. “It gives us ‘a law trapped in amber.’” It makes rules from the 21st century follow policies from the late 18th century.
Only Thomas disagreed
Justice Clarence Thomas, who authored that opinion, was left to passionately defend the court’s decision in 2022 while the majority of the court attempted to clarify things following Bruen.
Although some jurists found Thomas’s history and tradition test to be an inapplicable framework for analyzing the nation’s gun laws, it was this very approach that allowed Rahimi to win at the lower court level. Bruen needed a comparable statute in the nation’s history, according to the conservative 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals, and the prohibition must be lifted in its absence.
Gun regulations must be “consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation” in order to endure legal examination, according to Thomas, who stated on Friday that the “court’s directive was clear” in Bruen.
He wrote that the approach would apply to Rahimi’s case. The government, Thomas argued, had not shown any examples of “laws before, during, and after our nation’s founding” that were comparable to the ruling that the court had sustained on Friday.
The Second Amendment guarantees Rahimi because he “is a member of the political community,” Thomas stated.
“The question is whether the government can strip the Second Amendment right of anyone subject to a protective order – even if he has never been accused or convicted of a crime,” Thomas wrote. It just can’t.
