Supreme Court to decide if gun bans for domestic abusers are constitutional

The U.S. Supreme Court hears argument Tuesday in yet another gun-rights case.

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The Supreme Court hears arguments Tuesday in a case that could invalidate the federal law barring guns for anyone who is the subject of a domestic violence court order. If the federal law falls, so would similar laws in most states, and other important gun laws.

The case is the next chapter in the high court’s new Second Amendment doctrine.

How the case got to the court

Sixteen months ago, the conservative court majority broke sharply with the way gun laws had been handled by the courts in the past. In a landmark decision, the six-justice majority ruled that in order to be constitutional, a gun law has to be analogous to a law that existed at the nation’s founding in the late 1700s.

Since then, Second Amendment advocates have brought all manner of challenges to state and federal gun laws across the country, plunging the lower courts into conflicting conclusions about how precise the analog has to be. Tuesday’s case is the first to test of how far the conservative court wants to go, and how precise the analog has to be. At issue is the federal law that makes it a crime for anyone subject to a domestic violence court order to possess a gun.

The defendant in the case, Zackey Rahimi, is something of a poster child for why Congress passed the law in 1994. In 2019 he assaulted his girlfriend in a parking lot, and after realizing that a bystander saw the assault, he fired a gun at the witness, and threatened to shoot his girlfriend if she told anyone. Two months later, a Texas court granted her a protective order,…