In an 8-1 opinion yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court injected some sanity back into the runaway train that has been its recent firearms jurisprudence by ruling that domestic abusers can indeed be barred from possessing guns under federal law. Staying on brand, Justice Clarence Thomas was the lone dissenter, with the liberals and conservatives otherwise uniting.
In the majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that some judges on lower courts had “misunderstood the methodology of our recent Second Amendment cases.”
If Roberts is looking for a culprit of the confusion here, he should have the justices look in the mirror. The modern Supreme Court was the entity that created the notion that the Second Amendment’s language of “well-regulated militia” was practically irrelevant and the Constitution actually provided an almost unabridged right to possess firearms, based on a historical analysis of framer intent that was dubious at best.
In a decision written by Thomas, the justices struck down New York’s century-old gun law on the idea that it was insufficiently rooted in history, setting aside its longevity and the long-standing debate over what exactly was intended by the original 1789 language of the amendment. That ruling opened the floodgates for challenges to all manner of common-sense gun regulations around the country, challenges that the plaintiffs understood the court to have all but invited.
Just last week, the high court veered into extreme technicality in another Thomas opinion that bump stocks, which enable semi-automatic weapons to fire automatically, like machine guns, were not in fact machine gun modifications. Sure thing.
If it’s unclear where exactly the Supremes will land on any given gun case, that’s because it doesn’t seem to be responding to any particular doctrine or system of analysis, but hewing basically to how the justices feel about any given limitation.
In this instance, we’re lucky they came down on the right side. Intimate partner violence is not only depressingly common in this country, but made much deadlier by the presence of a firearm, which can turn an altercation into a lethal one in a matter of seconds.
This is also very often a precursor or indicator of other types of violence. Mass shooters often have earlier records of domestic abuse and interpersonal violence. Keeping guns out of the hands of these individuals is not only about protecting their vulnerable intimate partners and family members but all the rest of us as well.
The majority’s unequivocal assertion that regulation to limit dangerous people’s access to firearms is legal will also open the door — or, rather, keep the door open — to laws that block gun purchases by other types of people who shouldn’t have them. Our nation is already awash in firearms in a way that makes the most mundane daily interactions and situations carry an unacceptable risk; the least we can do is actively intervene to mitigate that risk by preventing dangerous people from having dangerous weapons.
Just as an example, perhaps people who have been convicted for planning and executing a violent attack on the nation’s Capitol with the intent to overthrow a democratic election, or many others who participated in the legal and practical efforts to subvert our system of government, shouldn’t get to carry guns.