The Supreme Court is set to hear a case this term which could shape the future of Second Amendment law. At the center of the case is Zackey Rahimi, who was involved in five shootings between December 2020 and January 2021.
According to court documents, one of these incidents involved Rahimi firing shots into the air after his friend’s credit card was declined at a Whataburger.
When police executed a search warrant on Rahimi’s home they discovered that he was in possession of a firearm which violated a civil protective order entered against him in February 2020 for allegedly assaulting his ex-girlfriend.
A federal grand jury indicted Rahimi under a statute that disallows those subject to domestic violence restraining orders from possessing firearms.
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with Rahimi’s challenge to the law’s constitutionality in February, finding it did not adhere to the standard set out by the Supreme Court in their 2022 ruling on New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen, which stated that regulations must be within our nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.
“Rahimi, while hardly a model citizen, is nonetheless part of the political community entitled to the Second Amendment’s guarantees, all other things equal,” the court found.
The Fifth Circuit specified in its ruling that the question at hand in the case is “not whether prohibiting the possession of firearms by someone subject to a domestic violence restraining order is a laudable policy goal.” Rather, it frames it as a more nuanced question of due process.
“The question is whether a restraining order achieved through the civil law process (lower burden of proof), and not the criminal law process (higher burden of proof) is enough to strip a person’s constitutional rights when that person has not been convicted of a felony,” John Shu, an attorney and legal commentator who served in the George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush administrations, explained to the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Rahimi had been charged with multiple state offenses before the five shootings, including aggravated assault with a deadly weapon in November 2020 and use of a firearm in the physical assault of his girlfriend in December 2019.
However, since he was not convicted, this has become an issue for the Supreme Court to consider.
As Shu points out, if Rahimi had been convicted of a felony, it would…
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