There is good news in the judgment of the Supreme Court on Friday United States v. Rahimi: The court concluded that at least some people do not have a specific right to own a firearm under a domestic violence restraining order, and upheld a law that prevented them from doing so. when Rahimi In a maze of concurrences and dissents, the eight justices ultimately agreed that a man who literally threatened to shoot the mother of his child should not be armed.
But there’s bad news: Chief Justice John Roberts’s majority opinion is completely inconsistent.
This does nothing to alleviate the mass confusion created by the Court’s 2022 decision New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruenwhich held that all gun laws are unconstitutional unless the government can “demonstrate that the regulation Consistent with this nation’s historic tradition of gun controlThe decision threw gun control across the United States into disarray and created an unusually long list of complaints from sitting justices.
inside Rahimi, The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has struck down a federal law that prohibits gun possession orders for people subject to domestic violence. Yet, although the Fifth Circuit has a history of taking liberties with the law to achieve conservative results, its decision Rahimi The case was properly decided under the bridge.
As Justice Clarence Thomas persuasively argued in dissent, the bridge Forced the Fifth Circuit to rule that domestic abusers do, in fact, have a Second Amendment right to own a gun. Friday’s decision Rahimi Basically carves out an exception the bridge It’s big enough to allow Jackie Rahimi, the cartoonishly violent man at the center of the case, to be disarmed. But Roberts’ opinion does something else. And it provides absolutely no meaningful guidance to lower court judges struggling to apply the vague “historical tradition” test it has announced. the bridge.
Indeed, in a concurring opinion, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson cited a dozen dissenting opinions from lower courts to ask the Supreme Court how, precisely, the bridge to work As one of these opinions cautions the justices, “Courts, acting in good faith, Bruen struggles at every stage of the investigation. These struggles revolve around numerous, often perverse, difficult questions.”
Jackson urged his court to abandon it the bridge fully, and suggested that the justices should instead reinstate a two-step framework that allows “each appellate court to evaluate whether a firearms regulation was consistent with the Second Amendment.” The landmark 2008 gun decisionAt least before Dunning-Kruger The judges decided they knew better the bridge case
But, alas, that won’t happen — until this court’s 6-3 Republican supermajority decides how the law works. Instead, the court handed down an understandable decision that does little more than prevent one of America’s most dangerous people from owning a gun.
Although Roberts’ opinion is supported the part The federal law disarming domestic abusers, which doesn’t even declare the entire law constitutional, leaves open the possibility that future courts could allow at least some extremely dangerous people to own guns.
Roberts’ majority opinion is pure gobbledygook
The the bridge The decision places an extremely high burden on any government lawyer trying to convince a court that any gun law is constitutional. The government had to point to “similar regulations” existing at the time of the Constitution to show that a gun law was consistent with “this nation’s historic tradition of firearms control.” And the government carried a particularly high burden when it hoped to enforce a law that was “a general social problem that has persisted since the 18th century”.
bridge, In other words, there was a bold experiment in “originalism,” the idea that the only legitimate way to interpret the Constitution is to ask how it was understood when it was created.
Under an honest application the bridgeIts test, domestic abusers absolutely have the right to own a gun. Of course, violence between romantic partners existed in the 18th century, but there were no laws targeting this social problem, and no laws disarming domestic abusers. Indeed, until 1871, when the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that husband and wife “Each may be charged with assault and battery“All 50 states have made it a crime for married partners to beat their wives.
Nevertheless, every justice except Thomas understood that allowing Rahimi to keep the gun would be unconstitutional. Roberts’ majority opinion begins with a chilling litany of the history of Rahimi firing guns in public when he gets angry. Among other things, Rahimi threatened to shoot two different women. He opened fire on someone’s house. And he fired his gun in the air at a burger restaurant after the restaurant declined his friend’s credit card.
In total, Rahimi appears to have committed six different shooting crimes in addition to threatening to shoot other people — that is, crimes in which he actually discharged his firearm.
Nevertheless, rather admits that the bridge While the framework must be fundamentally flawed if it leads a federal appeals court to conclude that this uniquely dangerous felon has a constitutional right to own a gun, Roberts instead tries to deflect blame, claiming that “some courts have misunderstood our recent Second Amendment approach. case.” He then drops two insightful paragraphs to explain how the bridge to work
When evaluating whether a gun law is constitutional, Roberts writes, “a court must ascertain whether the new law is ‘substantially analogous’ to the laws our tradition permits.” He added that “if founding statutes regulate the use of firearms to address specific problems, that would be a strong indicator that contemporary statutes imposing similar restrictions for similar reasons fall within an authorized category of regulation.”
Yet Roberts cautions this statement as well, asserting that “even when a law restricts the bearing of arms for authorized reasons, however, it may not be inconsistent with the right if it exceeds what was done at the time of its establishment.”
So judges must ask whether a modern-day law is “relevantly similar” to a founding gun law, whatever that means. Modern law is likely to be constitutional if it solves a problem that the Founders also sought to solve, but only if modern law “goes beyond what was done at the time of its founding.”
It’s hard to feel sorry for the poor lower court judges who will have to apply this word salad to future cases.
Regardless, Roberts contends that a modern law prohibiting Jackie Rahimi from owning a gun is constitutional because something called “bail” laws existed two or three centuries ago. These laws require “persons suspected of future misconduct to post a bond”—that is, to pay a sum of money that will be forfeited if they engage in such misconduct. As Roberts writes, these laws “can be invoked to prevent all forms of violence, including spousal abuse.”
So, apparently, these bail laws are “substantially the same” as modern laws that prohibit domestic abusers from owning guns that can disarm Jackie Rahimi.
That’s actually a pretty significant retreat from that the bridge. Thomas as he writes Rahimi Dissent the bridge Not only does it make a very high presumption that any modern gun law unconstitutionally addresses a social problem that existed in the 1700s, it also states that “if earlier generations dealt with the social problem but did so in a materially different way, that too might be the case.” That a modern regulation is unconstitutional.”
Although bail laws allowed some legal consequences to be imposed on early American domestic abusers, Thomas wrote, they “imposed a materially different burden.” Bail laws did not “alter a person’s right to keep and bear arms,” they only required certain persons to pay certain sums.
So the court took some steps to weaken it the bridge. When both the bridge And Rahimi Holds that the government must show that any modern gun law is substantially similar to a century-old gun law if the modern law is to be upheld, Rahimi suggests that the two laws should not be too precisely alike. As Roberts writes, the bridge “Stuck in Amber is not intended to suggest a law.”
but RahimiIts examination is no less inconsistent the bridgeer, and Jackson does nothing to mitigate the many complaints that come from lower court judges in his acquiescence. Rahimi Simply states in vague terms that more gun laws should be upheld than were upheld in the first two years the bridge.
If it is unclear Rahimi Even allows all domestic abusers to disarm
Notably, Roberts’ majority opinion also places great weight on the fact that Rahimi was brought in what is known as a “facial” challenge to federal laws disarming domestic abusers.
Facial challenges allege that a particular law is unconstitutional in all its application, meaning that a court must effectively strike it from the books. They stand in contrast to weak “applicability” challenges, which allege that a law is unconstitutional only if applied against a particular group. As Roberts explains, facial challenges are notoriously difficult to win—the party challenging the statute must “establish that no circumstances exist under which the statute would be valid.”
But Mr. Rahimi’s case also involved the most extreme events imaginable—most criminals, even those charged with serious gun crimes, were not involved in six separate shootings. And so Roberts concludes that federal law disarming domestic abusers “is constitutional when applied to the facts of Rahimi’s own case.” Rahimi’s facial challenge fails.
but Rahimi The decision doesn’t even uphold entire federal laws barring domestic abusers from owning guns. The Act contains two separate provisions for when someone subject to a restraining order must be disarmed. The court upheld one of these provisions, but deferred until another day the question of whether the other was constitutional.
The federal disarmament statute at issue in this case applies to two different situations. One provision prohibits someone from possessing guns if a court finds they pose a “credible threat to the physical safety” of certain people. The second provision applies if someone is subject to a restraining order that “prohibits the use, attempted use, or threatened use of physical force.”
The Roberts opinion upholds the first of these provisions, but leaves open for another day whether someone can be disarmed after a court orders them not to use physical force against another person. And, because the legal framework declared Rahimi The majority is so vague, how lower courts will approach this still-open legal question is anyone’s guess.
RahimiIn other words, a monument to this court’s arrogance and inability to admit its own mistakes. the bridge This is an ineffective reversal that has caused widespread confusion among the lower courts. It should be completely abolished.
Instead, all courts are carving out an exception to what is Friday the bridge For some—not even all—those who commit domestic violence.
