The Supreme Court ruled in an 8-1 decision June 21 to uphold a law preventing those subject to domestic abuse restraining orders from possessing firearms.

United States v. Rahimi is the Court’s first major ruling on the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution since the recent landmark decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen, which said the constitutionality of modern gun laws must be evaluated with respect to historical norms. Specifically, the 2022 decision ruled that a gun restriction is only constitutional if an analogous law was in place in 1791, when the Second Amendment was ratified, or around 1868, when the U.S. adopted the Fourteenth Amendment, which expanded protections on gun rights.

The case addresses the question of whether Congress can prohibit the possession of firearms by someone subject to a domestic violence restraining order, said Adam Winkler, a professor at the UCLA School of Law. Zackey Rahimi, the defendant, received a domestic violence restraining order from his ex-girlfriend that barred him from having a gun, yet police later acquired a warrant to search his home and found multiple firearms.

Following his arrest, a grand jury indicted Rahimi under a federal law stating that those subject to domestic violence restraining orders may not possess firearms.

After his conviction, Rahimi challenged the ruling on the grounds that he believed the federal law barring him – and others subject to domestic abuse restraining orders – from possessing guns violated his Second Amendment right to bear arms. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit sided with Rahimi in March 2023, stating the gun restriction failed the “Bruen test” because the court could not find a historical analog for the statute.

“Considering the issue afresh, we conclude that Bruen requires us to re-evaluate our Second Amendment jurisprudence,” the panel of Fifth Circuit judges said in the decision. “We therefore reverse the district court’s ruling to the contrary and vacate Rahimi’s conviction.”

The Supreme Court decided to hear the case for the 2023-2024 term in June 2023. Over a year later, the Court overturned the lower court’s ruling and said the gun restriction did, in fact, have a historical analog.

Winkler, a constitutional law expert, said the importance of this case lies in the precedent it sets for further Second Amendment rulings subject to Bruen – particularly regarding the similarity the Court requires between gun restrictions of the present and those of the 18th and 19th centuries.

Since the Bruen ruling, federal courts have struck down several gun restrictions, including prohibitions on possessing guns in places where alcohol is served and bans on 18- to 21-year-olds possessing handguns, because of an inability to find exact historical analogs, Winkler added.

“The fact that the Supreme Court is hearing this case is in some ways a reflection of how extreme some courts have applied Bruen tests,” he said. “Many courts around the country have been reading Bruen to require that the gun laws of today are almost exactly the same as the gun laws of yesterday.”

The Court’s ruling in Rahimi clarified that Bruen requires a historical analog, rather than a “historical twin,” said Eugene Volokh, a constitutional law expert.

The majority concluded that laws in the 18th and 19th centuries requiring people who threatened other citizens to post bond and disarming those who were “likely to terrify” were sufficiently similar to allow the legal restriction on domestic abusers possessing firearms, Volokh added.

Justice Clarence Thomas was the sole dissenter in the decision. His dissent stated that the historical laws mentioned by his fellow justices were not analogous enough to uphold the federal statute.

“This Court’s directive was clear: A firearm regulation that fills within the Second Amendment’s plain text is unconstitutional unless it is consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation,” Thomas’ dissent said. “Not a single historical regulation justifies the statute at issue.”

The decision strengthens the case for the constitutionality of certain gun restrictions, including some “red flag” laws, which allow courts to issue orders restricting those who pose dangers to themselves or others from buying or possessing firearms, Volokh added. A ruling in favor of Rahimi that tightened the scope of which laws the Court would consider sufficiently similar could have threatened red flag laws, as they have no precise historical analogy, Winkler said.

“The premise of this ruling, of course, is that there is a tradition of disarming people who are found to pose a substantial risk of violence to others,” Volokh said. “When we’re talking about red flag laws, the premise is precisely that there’s some articulable reason to think this person poses a risk of violence.”

A study by Jacquelyn Campbell, professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, found that an abuser is five times more likely to kill his female partner if he has access to a gun – a statistic cited by Justice Sonia Sotomayor in her concurring opinion.

While Americans could see the Supreme Court’s next Second Amendment case in the following few years, future decisions will, above all, depend upon levels of disagreement between lower courts rather than time, Volokh said.

“A lot will depend upon how much disagreement there is among lower courts,” he said. “If that disagreement persists, then in the next couple of years, it may be (that) the Supreme Court will agree to hear one of those cases.”