Zackey Rahimi’s case has brought up the issue of whether the federal law prohibiting people subject to domestic-violence orders from possessing firearms violates the Second Amendment. Although Rahimi is far from a model citizen, with a history of armed violence, a federal appeals court has overturned his conviction, ruling that the law violated the Second Amendment. Next week, the Supreme Court will decide whether to hear an appeal of that decision, which applied a history-based test to disarm Mr. Rahimi under the domestic-violence law. The case could give the Supreme Court a chance to explore the scope of its new test, which requires the government to identify historical analogues to justify laws limiting Second Amendment rights.
Rahimi’s case started in 2019 when he assaulted his girlfriend and threatened to shoot her if she told anyone, leading her to obtain a restraining order. The order suspended Rahimi’s handgun license and prohibited him from possessing firearms. But he defied the order and threatened another woman with a gun, leading to charges of assault with a deadly weapon. He then opened fire in public five times in the space of two months, including shooting an AR-15 rifle into his former client’s home and firing several bullets into the air outside a fast-food restaurant.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit initially affirmed Rahimi’s conviction, but the appeals reversed course after the Supreme Court issued a new test last June to decide whether gun control laws are constitutional, one focused on history. Under that test, a unanimous three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit ruled that the law in question violated the Second Amendment because there was no historical support for it.
The Biden administration is appealing the case, arguing that there is strong historical evidence supporting the general principle that the government may disarm dangerous individuals. But the Fifth Circuit rejected a variety of old laws identified by the government as possible analogues, saying they did not sufficiently resemble the one concerning domestic-violence orders. Many of them disarmed classes of people considered to be dangerous, which was different from domestic-violence orders, which make case-by-case judgments about a particular individual’s dangerousness.
In a concurring opinion, Judge James C. Ho said that while he believed those who commit violence, including domestic violence, should be detained, prosecuted, convicted, and incarcerated, he did not think domestic-violence orders were the answer. He said scholars and judges have expressed concern that civil protective orders are misused as a tactical device in divorce proceedings. Therefore, it was difficult to justify the law Mr. Rahimi challenged as a measure to disarm dangerous individuals.
In short, the case of Zackey Rahimi brings up some interesting questions about the scope of the Second Amendment and whether the government has the right to disarm individuals under certain circumstances. It will be up to the Supreme Court to decide whether to hear the case and provide some clarity on the issue.
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