United States v. Rahimi
Case Overview
CITATION
602 U.S. 680
ARGUED ON
Nov. 7, 2023
DECIDED ON
Jun. 21, 2024
DECIDED BY
Legal Issue
Does 18 U.S.C. §922(g)(8), which prohibits the possession of firearms by individuals subject to domestic-violence restraining orders, violate the Second Amendment on its face?
Holding
No, 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.
Protestor outside of the Supreme Court before oral arguments began in United States v. Rahimi | Credit: Bill Clark/Roll Call via Getty Images
Background
In December of 2019, Zackey Rahimi met his girlfriend, CM, for lunch in a parking lot. During lunch, they began arguing and CM attempted to leave. Rahimi grabber CM by the wrist, dragged her to his car, and shoved her in (causing her to hit her head on the dashboard). When Rahimi noticed a bystander observing, Rahimi pulled a gun from underneath the passenger seat. CM used this as an opportunity to escape, and Rahimi fired his gun as she fled. It was unclear whether Rahimi was aiming at CM or the bystander, but Rahimi later called to threaten CM that he would shoot her if she reported the incident.
Despite Rahimi’s threat, CM sought a restraining order against him and recounted the parking lot incident and other assaults in her accompanying affidavit. Additionally, CM detailed how Rahimi’s conduct endangered their child, AR. Rahimi was given an opportunity to contest the testimony, but he chose not to. In February 2020, a state court in Tarrant County, Texas, issued a restraining order against Rahimi with the consent of both parties. The order included a finding that Rahimi had committed “family violence” that was “likely to occur again” and that Rahimi posed “a credible threat” to the “physical safety” of CM or AR. Based on these findings, the order prohibited Rahimi from threatening CM or her family for two years or contacting CM during that period except to discuss AR. It also suspended Rahimi’s gun license for two years.
In May of 2020, Rahimi violated the order by approaching CM’s home at night and contacting her through several social media accounts. In November, Rahimi threatened a different woman with a gun, resulting in a charge for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. Furthermore, while Rahimi was under arrest for that assault, the Texas police identified him as the suspect in a spate of at least five additional shootings. The first, which occurred in December 2020, arose from Rahimi’s dealing in illegal drugs. After one of his customers “started talking trash,” Rahimi drove to the man’s home and shot into it. While driving the next day, Rahimi collided with another car, exited his vehicle, and proceeded to shoot at the other car. Three days later, he fired his gun in the air while driving through a residential neighborhood. A few weeks after that, Rahimi was speeding on a highway near Arlington, Texas, when a truck flashed its lights at him. Rahimi hit the brakes and cut across traffic to chase the truck. Once off the highway, he fired several times toward the truck and a nearby car before fleeing. Two weeks after that, Rahimi and a friend were dining at a roadside burger restaurant. When the restaurant declined his friend’s credit card, Rahimi pulled a gun and shot into the air. The police obtained a warrant to search Rahimi’s residence, where they discovered a pistol, a rifle, ammunition, and a copy of the restraining order.
Rahimi was indicted under 18 U. S. C. §922(g)(8) on one count of possessing a firearm while subject to a domestic violence restraining order. Rahimi moved to dismiss the indictment, arguing that §922(g)(8) facially violated the Second Amendment’s protection of the right to keep and bear arms. The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas denied Rahimi’s motion, and he then pleaded guilty. On appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, Rahimi again raised his Second Amendment challenge, but his appeal was denied. Rahimi then petitioned for rehearing en banc.
While Rahimi’s petition was pending, the Supreme Court decided New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn., Inc. v. Bruen (2022). In Bruen, the Court held that when a firearm regulation is challenged under the Second Amendment, the Government must show that the restriction “is consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” In light of this holding, the panel withdrew the prior opinion and ordered additional briefing. A new panel then heard oral argument and reversed the previous decision, concluding that §922(g)(8) doesn’t fit within the Nation’s tradition of firearm regulation. The Supreme Court then granted certiorari.
8 - 1 decision for the United States
United States
Rahimi
Roberts
Thomas
Kavanaugh
Alito
Kagan
Jackson
Barrett
Sotomayor
Gorsuch
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Writing for the Court, Chief Justice John Roberts began his analysis by reaffirming the Court’s holding in McDonald v. Chicago (2010) that the right to keep and bear arms is among the “fundamental rights necessary to our system of ordered liberty.” Roberts added that this right “secures for Americans a means of self-defense,” a principle validated in New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen (2022). He explained its roots in the struggles faced by our Founding Fathers during the American Revolution, particularly when British soldiers were dispatched by the government to confiscate the colonists’ weapons. The desire to protect the right to keep and bear arms was continued during Reconstruction when Congress incorporated the Second Amendment’s protections against the States through the Fourteenth Amendment.
Like most rights, the right to keep and bear arms is fundamental, but it’s not unlimited. Roberts explained that in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), the Court recognized that “the right was never thought to sweep indiscriminately” and provided historical examples of regulations on the right to keep and bear arms, such as restrictions on gun use by drunk partygoers or rules regarding storage requirements. Roberts elucidated that in Heller, the Court’s inquiry into the scope of the Second Amendment began with the constitutional text and history. In Bruen, the Court clarified that the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation is the proper source to examine to determine the “contours” of the right to keep and bear arms. Thus, if a challenged regulation fits within that tradition, it’s lawful under the Second Amendment. However, “when the Government regulates arms-bearing conduct, as when the Government regulates other constitutional rights, it bears the burden to ‘justify its regulation.’”
In the aftermath of Bruen, the proper analysis of the scope of the right to keep and bear arms is “whether the challenged regulation is consistent with the principles that underpin our regulatory tradition.” Roberts explained that “[a] court must ascertain whether the new law is ‘relevantly similar’ to laws that our tradition is understood to permit, ‘apply[ing] faithfully the balance struck by the founding generation to modern circumstances.’” Roberts emphasized that why the regulation was imposed and how the regulation burdened the right were central to this inquiry. He stated that “[t]he law must comport with the principles underlying the Second Amendment, but it need not be a ‘dead ringer’ or a ‘historical twin.’”
Roberts addressed how some courts have applied the Bruen test, writing that some “have misunderstood the methodology of our recent Second Amendment cases,” which “were not meant to suggest a law trapped in amber.” Roberts explained that just as the Second Amendment doesn’t apply only to those weapons which were in existence at the time it was written, “the Second Amendment permits more than just those regulations identical to ones that could be found in 1791.” He added that “[h]olding otherwise would be as mistaken as applying the protections of the right only to muskets and sabers.”
Moving to Rahimi’s case, Roberts first explained the difficulty in mounting a facial challenge to §922(g)(8), as the defendant is required to establish that no set of circumstances exists under which it’s valid. To prevail, the government only needs to demonstrate that §92(g)(8) is constitutional in some of its applications. Roberts then explained that §922(g)(8)
Reviewing the historical analogues to §922(g)(8), Roberts noted that since early English common law, statutes were enacted that barred individuals from using weapons to “harm or menace” the public. Roberts pointed to the Militia Act of 1662, which authorized the King’s agents to seize arms from anyone judged dangerous to the peace of the kingdom. Additionally, the 1689 English Bill of Rights preserved the right of Protestants to keep arms for defense, but this right remained constrained “by law.” Roberts explained that this history underscored the foundational and enduring principle that the government may disarm those who present an active and credible threat of violence to others.
Turning to domestic legal precursors, Roberts focused on two specific categories of founding-era legislation: surety laws and going armed laws. Historical surety laws allowed magistrates to require individuals suspected of future misbehavior or violence to post a bond; if the individual failed to secure a surety, they faced imprisonment, resulting in total disarmament. Roberts explained that these laws were frequently invoked to prevent all forms of interpersonal violence, including spousal abuse, and were heavily rooted in individual risk assessments. Similarly, going armed laws punished individuals who rode or went armed with dangerous weapons to terrify the public and frequently carried penalties of forfeiture of arms and imprisonment. Examining these laws, Roberts wrote that “[t]aken together, the surety and going armed laws confirm what common sense suggests: When an individual poses a clear threat of physical violence to another, the threatening individual may be disarmed.”
Roberts rejected the argument that modern gun regulations must have an identical historical twin from 1791 to be upheld and clarified that the standard established in Bruen merely requires a modern restriction to be “relevantly similar” in both why and how it burdens the Second Amendment right. Roberts found that §922(g)(8) matches the why of surety and going armed laws because it operates strictly to check localized, individualized threats of physical violence rather than broadly restricting the public at large. It matches the how because it involves an individualized judicial determination, contains rigorous procedural protections, and applies only for the temporary duration of the protective order. Furthermore, because historical going armed laws permitted full imprisonment for threatening behavior, Roberts reasoned that the lesser burden of temporary disarmament under §922(g)(8) easily fits within the Nations historical tradition of firearm regulation.
Roberts then addressed the government’s argument that Rahimi may be disarmed simply because he’s not responsible, rejecting it outright. Roberts asserted that the term “responsible” is vague and that it’s “unclear what such a rule would entail.” He explained that the use of the term responsible in Heller and Bruen was “to describe the class of ordinary citizens who undoubtedly enjoy the Second Amendment right… But those decisions did not define the term and said nothing about the status of citizens who were not ‘responsible.’ The question was simply not presented.”
In closing, Roberts noted that like in Heller, McDonald, and Bruen, the Court did not undertake an exhaustive historical analysis of the full scope of the Second Amendment. Rather, he wrote, “we conclude only this: 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.”
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In her concurring opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor stated that while she agreed with the Court’s application of Bruen as precedent, she wrote separately “to highlight why the Court’s interpretation of Bruen, and not the dissent’s, is the right one.” Sotomayor explained that “the Court’s interpretation permits a historical inquiry calibrated to reveal something useful and transferable to the present day, while the dissent would make the historical inquiry so exacting as to be useless, a too-sensitive alarm that sounds whenever a regulation did not exist in an essentially identical form at the founding.”
Sotomayor first addressed the application of Bruen to Rahimi’s challenge, writing that “this is an easy case.” Sotomayor emphasized that the government’s burden was to demonstrate a historical analogue with underlying principles that comport with §922(g)(3), not a historical twin. She agreed with the Court that the surety laws and going armed laws were a sufficient analogue since they restricted gun use to mitigate demonstrated threats of violence. Sotomayor concluded, “[t]hat shared principle is sufficient.”
Responding to the dissent, Sotomayor criticized it for applying “the strictest possible interpretation” of Bruen. Sotomayor wrote that the dissent “picks off the Government’s historical sources one by one, viewing any basis for distinction as fatal.” She argued that “[i]f the dissent’s interpretation of Bruen were the law, then Bruen really would be the ‘one-way ratchet’ that I and the other dissenters in that case feared, ‘disqualify[ing] virtually any representative historical analogue and mak[ing] it nearly impossible to sustain common-sense regulations necessary to our Nation’s safety and security.’” Sotomayor also criticized the dissent’s use of history in its analysis, writing that “the legislatures of today would be limited not by a distant generation’s determination that such a law was unconstitutional, but by a distant generation’s failure to consider that such a law might be necessary. History has a role to play in Second Amendment analysis, but a rigid adherence to history, (particularly history predating the inclusion of women and people of color as full members of the polity), impoverishes constitutional interpretation and hamstrings our democracy.”
Lastly, Sotomayor wrote that while she welcomes the Court’s rejection of the dissent’s rigid application of Bruen, she “remain[s] troubled by Bruen’s myopic focus on history and tradition, which fails to give full consideration to the real and present stakes of the problems facing our society today.” Sotomayor argued that the Second Amendment allows legislators to consider issues related to gun violence “not merely by asking what their predecessors at the time of the founding or Reconstruction thought, but by listening to their constituents and crafting new and appropriately tailored solutions.” She asserted that means-end scrutiny was the appropriate analysis for Second Amendment challenges, which would require the government to only demonstrate a compelling interest for its restriction of the right to keep and bear arms. Sotomayor explained that under that regime, §922(g)(8) would still be upheld since the government has a compelling interest in keeping firearms out of the hands of domestic abusers. Ultimately, Sotomayor concluded that “[w]hether considered under Bruen or under means-end scrutiny, §922(g)(8) clears the constitutional bar.” She added that she “join[s] in full the Court’s opinion, which offers a more helpful model than the dissent for lower courts struggling to apply Bruen.”