The Supreme Court has ruled that when an individual has been found by a court to pose a credible threat to the physical safety of another, that individual can be temporarily disarmed consistent with the Second Amendment.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the opinion, and Justice Clarence Thomas provided the lone dissent.
“When a restraining order contains a finding that an individual poses a credible threat to the physical safety of an intimate partner, that individual may — consistent with the Second Amendment — be banned from possessing firearms while the order is in effect,” Roberts wrote for the court.
It’s the court’s first Second Amendment case since the Republican-appointed majority further expanded gun rights in a 2022 decision called Bruen. In that 2022 case from New York, Thomas’ 6-3 opinion said that gun regulations can’t stand unless they’re “consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”
That led the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to strike down the law at issue in this case, United States v. Rahimi. “The question presented in this case is not whether prohibiting the possession of firearms by someone subject to a domestic violence restraining order is a laudable policy goal,” the three-judge 5th Circuit panel of Republican appointees explained last year. “The question,” it said, “is whether 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(8), a specific statute that does so, is constitutional under the Second Amendment.” In light of Bruen, the panel said, “it is not.”
So the appeal in Rahimi gave the Supreme Court another chance this term to reverse a circuit court that’s even further to the right of the high court. But the case also forced the justices to confront their own jurisprudence, given that Bruen naturally called a host of modern, commonsense gun regulations into question.
Roberts’ opinion Friday reversed the 5th Circuit’s ruling, deciding that the law survives Zackey Rahimi’s challenge. “Our tradition of firearm regulation allows the Government to disarm individuals who present a credible threat to the physical safety of others,” he wrote. All of the other justices besides Thomas signed on to Roberts’ opinion, though several justices wrote their own concurring opinions. Thomas argued in his dissent that “[n]ot a single historical regulation justifies the statute at issue” and that, “in the interest of ensuring the Government can regulate one subset of society, today’s decision puts at risk the Second Amendment rights of many more.” Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for weekly updates on the top legal stories, including news from the Supreme Court, the Donald Trump cases and more.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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