(Headline USA) A year after its Bruen decision, the Supreme Court agreed Friday to hear a new case about gun rights.
The justices will hear the Biden administration’s appeal of a ruling that struck down as unconstitutional a federal law meant to keep guns away from people who have domestic violence restraining orders, which are not criminal convictions, against them.
Arguments will take place in the fall in the first case on guns after Bruen.
That decision in the case has secured gun rights across the country. It’s led to a rash of rulings invalidating some long-standing, and unconstitutional, restrictions on firearms.
Governments have to justify gun control laws by showing they are “consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in an opinion that was joined by the other five conservative justices.
The case now before the court involves Zackey Rahimi, whose conviction of possessing guns while subject to a restraining order was thrown out by a panel of three judges on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Upon police showing up at his home with a search warrant for an unrelated investigation, Rahimi admitted both to having guns in the house and being subject to a domestic violence restraining order that prohibited gun possession,
Though “hardly a model citizen,” Rahimi did not lose his constitutional right to have guns, the court concluded. The law at issue could not be justified by looking to history, the unanimous panel argued.
The appeals court initially upheld the conviction, then reconsidered once the Supreme Court ruled in Bruen.
On the day the court finished deciding the cases argued in recent months, the legal fight over a gun law was among six cases that the justices added to their agenda for the term that begins on the first Monday in October.
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press
