The Supreme Court of the United States has admitted limits on the right to keep and bear firearms enshrined in the Second Amendment of the Constitution. Following the rulings in which this right has been expanded, the judges have issued a ruling this Friday in which they consider the prohibition on people subject to a restraining order for domestic violence from having weapons justified. The case affected Zackey Rahimi, who was charged with violating that law, but may have consequences by analogy in the case in which Hunter Biden, son of President Joe Biden, has been found guilty for the purchase and possession of a revolver when he was drug addict.
Rahimi, a drug dealer in Texas, attacked his girlfriend in 2019 and threatened to shoot her if she reported him. She did so and requested a restraining order that also prohibited her from having firearms. However, the abuser not only continued to carry a gun, but also threatened another woman with it and participated in five shootings in two months in Arlington (Texas) and its surrounding areas. That led to a search warrant for his house, where several weapons were found, leading to his indictment.
Rahimi asked for the indictment to be dismissed on the grounds that it violated the Second Amendment, but the judges rejected it in the first instance. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court issued a ruling that annulled the law restricting firearms in New York, arguing that any limit must fit “with the nation’s historical tradition of firearms regulation.” Since in the historical tradition of the times when the Second Amendment was passed there was nothing resembling a prohibition on abusers from carrying weapons, the Court of Appeals applied that doctrine and dismissed the charge against Rahimi. The Biden Government appealed that decision to the Supreme Court.
Now, some of the conservative justices have had to balance their doctrine of originalism, according to which the Constitution must be interpreted according to the time in which it was written. “The Second Amendment allows for more than just regulations identical to those existing in 1791,” says the new ruling, which also appeals to “common sense.”
Eight judges have supported the ban in a ruling written by the president of the Supreme Court himself, the conservative John Roberts: “When a restraining order establishes that a person represents a credible threat to the physical safety of his partner, he can be prohibited — under the Second Amendment—the possession of firearms while the order is in effect. Since their founding, our country’s firearms laws have included provisions that prevent people who threaten to cause physical harm to others from misusing firearms,” the text says, appealing to history to not disavow the controversial sentence from two years ago.
The only one who has remained strictly faithful to the historical criterion is the ultra-conservative Clarence Thomas, author of the ruling on regulation in New York, who has signed a dissenting opinion in which he defends that even abusers have the constitutional right to carry and carry weapons if they are not convicted. He criticizes that the rule does not require that it has been proven that a person has ever committed a crime of domestic violence and that it is not activated by a criminal conviction or by a person’s criminal record, but only by the restraining order.
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“The question is whether the Government can strip the Second Amendment right of anyone subject to a protective order, even if they have never been charged or convicted of a crime. Can not. “The Court and the Government do not point to a single landmark law that revokes a citizen’s Second Amendment right based on potential interpersonal violence,” Thomas writes in his dissent.
Rahimi’s case generates some echoes in that of Hunter Biden, convicted of three crimes for purchasing and possessing a revolver when he was a drug addict, lying on the form required to acquire the weapon. If the Supreme Court had struck down the law restricting guns in domestic violence cases, it could be inferred that it would do something similar in his case. It is more difficult to know if, once the norm is validated in cases where an explicit threat is contemplated, judges will endorse laws such as those that have served to condemn the president’s son.
Although the meaning of the sentence harms, in principle, his son, Joe Biden has applauded the judges’ decision: “No one who has suffered abuse should have to worry about their attacker getting a weapon. As a result of today’s ruling, victims of domestic violence and their families will be able to continue to have fundamental protections, just as they have for the last three decades,” the president said in a statement released by the White House. “Throughout my career, I have worked to prevent domestic abusers from purchasing guns and to protect all Americans from the threat of gun violence,” he added.
Firearms are the most commonly used in homicides of spouses, intimate partners, children or family members in recent years, according to data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cited by the Associated Press. Firearms were used in more than half, 57%, of those murders in 2020, a year that saw an overall increase in domestic violence during the coronavirus pandemic. Seventy women a month, on average, are shot to death by their partners, according to the gun control group Everytown for Gun Safety.
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