The Supreme Court ruled Friday that Second Amendment rights are not absolute, reasoning the government can disarm someone temporarily if the person has been found to be dangerous.
The 8-1 ruling involved Zackey Rahimi, a Texan who was under a domestic violence restraining order, which under federal law is a bar to possessing a gun. Rahimi had challenged that federal law, saying it ran afoul of his Second Amendment right.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for the court, said the federal law was consistent with the country’s tradition of disarming those who have been ruled to be a danger to society, ruling against Rahimi’s challenge.
“An individual found by a court to pose a credible threat to the physical safety of another may be temporarily disarmed consistent with the Second Amendment,” he wrote.
He said a restraining order issued by a court is sufficient for putting someone’s right to possess a firearm on hold.
“Since the founding, our nation’s firearm laws have included provisions preventing individuals who threaten physical harm to others from misusing firearms. As applied to the facts of this case, Section 922(g)(8) fits comfortably within this tradition,” the chief justice said, upholding the federal law.
The decision is a major victory for gun-control advocates, giving them new legal ground to defend federal and state laws that restrict firearm ownership.
It also pumps the brakes on the court’s landmark 2022 ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, which said in order to survive constitutional scrutiny, gun laws must be consistent with what the founders would have countenanced.
Chief Justice Roberts said the Bruen decision doesn’t mean there has to be an exact analog, or “historical twin,” but rather laws today must be true to the principles of the authors of the Second Amendment.
For example, he cited bans on felons and mentally ill possessing guns.
“Our tradition of firearm regulation allows the government to disarm individuals who present a credible threat to the physical safety of others,” the chief justice wrote.
Justice Clarence Thomas, who wrote the Bruen decision, dissented from Friday’s ruling. He said there was no tradition of disarming people who faced domestic violence restraining orders, so the current law cannot survive the history test.
“Not a single historical regulation justifies the statute at issue,” he said.
Both gun-rights groups and gun-control activists had been eyeing the case looking for clarity in the wake of the 2022 Bruen ruling.
That decision overturned a state’s strict limits on issuing concealed-carry permits, with the court saying gun laws had to be consistent with what would have been countenanced by the founders in order to survive constitutional scrutiny.
Bruen ignited a wave of legislation and litigation.
Democrat-led states rushed to pass new restrictions on concealed carry, declaring large parts of their public property “sensitive” locations where firearms should be banned. Those laws face a barrage of legal challenges.
Gun-rights groups also went after laws barring types of weapons that can be sold and other restrictions such as time limits on how many firearms can be bought.
And inmates began to challenge their convictions as prohibited people. In addition to Rahimi, who contested the domestic protection orders part of federal gun law, convicts have challenged gun prohibitions on nonviolent felons, illegal immigrants and unlawful drug users.
That last category even includes Hunter Biden, President Biden’s son, who has argued at least some of the federal gun charges he was convicted of this month are unconstitutional.
The president, meanwhile, celebrated the Supreme Court’s decision, saying, “Throughout my career, I’ve worked to prevent domestic abusers from purchasing guns and to protect all Americans from the threat of gun violence. Vice President Harris and I remain firmly committed to ending violence against women and keeping Americans safe from gun violence. We will continue to call on Congress to further strengthen support and protections for survivors and to take action to stop the epidemic of gun violence tearing our communities apart.”
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who agreed with the majority’s ruling, wrote a concurrence arguing that the flurry of cases is “a tacit admission” that Bruen left lower courts struggling.
“The message that lower courts are sending now in Second Amendment cases could not be clearer. They say there is little method to Bruen’s madness,” she wrote.
GOP-appointed justices who were in the majority in that ruling did some soul-searching.
Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, a Trump appointee, said the court’s ruling is narrow and stressed that it doesn’t upend the originalist history test the court laid out two years ago.
“Discerning what the original meaning of the Constitution requires in this or that case may sometimes be difficult. Asking that question, however, at least keeps judges in their proper lane, seeking to honor the supreme law the people have ordained rather than substituting our will for theirs,” he wrote.
Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, another Trump appointee, defended the history test but said Second Amendment interpretation “is still in the relatively early innings.”
He said the high court’s precedent recognizes that the Second Amendment has some limitations and that precedent takes history into account.
Yet another Trump appointee, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, said originalism doesn’t trap courts only to the limits of what the founders did.
“Despite its unqualified text, the Second Amendment is not absolute. It codified a preexisting right, and preexisting limits on that right are part and parcel of it,” she wrote.
Rahimi’s case is the second major gun ruling out of the Supreme Court this year.
Earlier this month the justices overturned a 2018 decision by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to redefine bump stocks as machine guns.
Bump stocks try to mimic the rate of fire of automatic weapons.
The court, in a 6-3 ruling with Justice Thomas writing the lead opinion, said the definition Congress wrote into the law for what is a prohibited automatic weapon doesn’t match bump stocks. The majority said Congress could attempt to ban them, but it can’t be done by unilateral executive decision to reinterpret the definitions.
Rahimi had what prosecutors called a series of reckless shootings, but didn’t have a conviction. After a tense encounter with an ex-girlfriend, he was slapped with a protective order in Texas. Under federal law, that means he is barred from possessing a gun.
He was convicted of illegal possession, and the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals initially upheld the conviction. But after the Bruen ruling the appeals court reversed itself, saying it couldn’t find any analogy in the founders’ history to a ban on guns by those facing protective orders.