United States v. Rahimi
The Supreme Court ruled 8 to 1 that a federal law barring people under domestic violence restraining orders from possessing guns is constitutional, finding it fits within a centuries-old tradition of disarming individuals who pose a credible threat to others.
The decision was the first major test of the Court's 2022 Bruen ruling on the Second Amendment, and it clarified that modern gun laws need only a founding-era historical analogue — not an identical historical copy — giving lower courts crucial guidance on how to apply that standard.
How it got here: Rahimi pleaded guilty in federal district court after his Second Amendment challenge was denied; the Fifth Circuit reversed following the Supreme Court's Bruen decision; the Supreme Court granted certiorari to review whether the gun ban is constitutional.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Zackey Rahimi physically assaulted his girlfriend in a parking lot and later threatened to shoot her; a Texas court entered a domestic violence restraining order finding he was a credible threat to her safety and their child. Despite the order, police later found guns at his home and connected him to at least five shootings. He was charged under a federal law that bans gun possession for anyone subject to a qualifying domestic violence restraining order, and he argued the law was unconstitutional on its face.
The question before the Court
Can the federal government ban someone from owning a gun while they are under a domestic violence restraining order that found them to be a credible physical threat to an intimate partner or child?
The Court's answer
Yes — the federal law banning gun possession for people under domestic violence restraining orders is constitutional, at least when a court has specifically found the person poses a credible physical threat to an intimate partner or child. The Court found the law fits within a centuries-old tradition of disarmament, tracing back to founding-era "surety laws" that allowed courts to require threatening individuals to post a bond or be jailed, and "going armed" laws that punished those who menaced others with firearms.
Both types of founding-era laws recognized the same principle: someone found to pose a clear physical threat to another may be disarmed. Because Rahimi brought a facial challenge — the hardest type to win, requiring him to show the law is unconstitutional in every possible application — and because the law is plainly constitutional as applied to him, his challenge failed. The Court also corrected the Fifth Circuit's misreading of its 2022 Bruen decision: courts must find a historical analogue, not an identical founding-era copy, to uphold a modern gun law.
Curious how the Court got there? See the step-by-step legal reasoning →
Why it matters
The law covers people under domestic violence restraining orders across the country, and a ruling against it could have disabled a key tool for protecting abuse survivors. Forty-eight states and territories have similar laws that now remain on solid constitutional footing. The decision also tells courts evaluating other gun restrictions to look for historical principles, not historical twins — a clarification that will shape a wave of pending Second Amendment litigation.
What changes now
The case returns to the Fifth Circuit for further proceedings, but the federal domestic violence gun ban remains in force. The Court resolved only the facial challenge; as Justice Gorsuch's concurrence highlights, future litigants may still bring as-applied challenges in specific circumstances — such as cases involving no judicial credible-threat finding, permanent disarmament, or a person's claimed need for self-defense — and those questions remain open for lower courts to address.
What this does not decide
The Court decided only that the law is not unconstitutional in every application. It expressly left open whether disarmament is permissible without a judicial credible-threat finding, whether permanent disarmament is constitutional, whether the law applies to someone using a gun for self-defense, and whether other categorical legislative gun bans targeting broad classes of people are valid.
Concurrences and dissents
Concurrence — Justice Sotomayor
Justice Sotomayor joined the majority in full but wrote to emphasize two points. First, she argued the majority's reading of Bruen — requiring a historical analogue, not a historical twin — is the correct one, while the dissent's exacting approach would make Bruen an effectively useless one-way ratchet against gun regulation. Second, she maintained that the means-end scrutiny the Court rejected in Bruen would more readily confirm this law's constitutionality given the grave real-world stakes of domestic abusers having access to firearms.
Concurrence — Justice Gorsuch
Justice Gorsuch agreed Rahimi's facial challenge fails because founding-era surety and going armed laws show the government may temporarily disarm someone after a judicial finding of a credible threat — which is what the statute requires. He wrote separately to catalog what the decision does not resolve: the government's power to disarm without a credible-threat finding, to disarm permanently, to disarm someone who invokes self-defense, or to impose categorical disarmament on classes of people deemed 'not responsible.'
Concurrence — Justice Kavanaugh
Justice Kavanaugh wrote a lengthy essay defending the constitutional role of text, pre-ratification history, post-ratification history, and precedent in interpreting vague constitutional provisions. He argued that history-based analysis is superior to the balancing or means-end scrutiny approach, which effectively turns judges into policymakers. He traced the Court's use of historical analysis across two centuries and multiple constitutional provisions, and situated Heller, McDonald, Bruen, and today's decision within that tradition.
Concurrence — Justice Barrett
Justice Barrett wrote to clarify how originalism should inform the Second Amendment's historical inquiry. She distinguished between history that illuminates the original meaning of the text and post-ratification tradition unmoored from that meaning. She focused on the level-of-generality problem in Second Amendment cases — courts need a principle revealed by history, not a mold — and concluded the majority got the level of generality right: since the founding, laws have consistently prevented individuals who threaten physical harm from misusing firearms.
Concurrence — Justice Jackson
Justice Jackson joined the opinion in full but wrote separately to flag a systemic problem: lower courts are struggling to apply Bruen's history-and-tradition test consistently, producing widely divergent results. She collected examples from numerous courts expressing confusion about how to conduct the required historical analysis. She welcomed today's clarifications but argued that much more guidance is needed, and that the rule of law suffers when a legal standard yields inconsistent and unpredictable outcomes.
Dissent — Justice Thomas
Justice Thomas would have struck down the law, arguing no founding-era regulation is sufficiently analogous. Surety laws imposed only a financial penalty and left the accused's firearms untouched — far less burdensome than a total possession ban. Affray laws regulated only specific public conduct and did not cover interpersonal domestic violence. The majority improperly stitches pieces of different historical laws together, which he argues defeats the purpose of historical analysis and gives the government a blank check to disarm people.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court applied the Bruen framework for Second Amendment challenges: the government must show a challenged gun regulation is 'consistent with the Nation's historical tradition of firearm regulation,' meaning it must be 'relevantly similar' to founding-era laws in both why it burdens the right and how — the law need not be a 'dead ringer' or 'historical twin' for a founding-era counterpart.
- Because Rahimi brought a facial challenge — requiring him to show no valid application of the law exists — the government needed only to demonstrate the law is constitutional in some applications. The Court found it clearly constitutional as applied to Rahimi himself, who had been found by a court to pose a credible threat to others, which ended the facial challenge.
- The Court traced two founding-era legal regimes: 'surety laws,' which allowed magistrates to compel individuals suspected of future violence to post a bond or be jailed (with specific provisions for firearm threats and domestic violence), and 'going armed' laws, which punished those who menaced others with weapons through forfeiture of arms and imprisonment.
- Together, those founding-era laws establish a consistent historical principle — when a person is found to pose a clear threat of physical violence to another, the government may disarm that individual. Section 922(g)(8) is 'relevantly similar' to both regimes: it restricts gun possession only after a judicial finding of a credible threat, only for the duration of the order, and only against the individual found threatening — not the public generally.
- The Fifth Circuit made two errors: it read Bruen to require a 'historical twin' rather than a 'historical analogue,' and it focused on hypothetical scenarios where the law might be unconstitutional rather than the circumstances in which it is most likely to be constitutional — the wrong standard for evaluating a facial challenge.
- The Court also rejected the government's proposed rule that someone may be disarmed simply because they are not 'responsible.' That term appeared in Heller and Bruen only to describe citizens who undoubtedly possess Second Amendment rights; those decisions said nothing about the status of citizens who are not 'responsible,' making the term too vague to serve as an independent basis for disarmament.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Distinguishes New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn., Inc. v. Bruen (597 U. S. 1)
Bruen's use of surety laws to reject New York's broad licensing regime does not prevent surety laws from analogizing to this narrower, targeted disarmament statute.
Reaffirms District of Columbia v. Heller (554 U. S. 570)
Heller's list of presumptively lawful regulations and its recognition that the Second Amendment right is 'not unlimited' support upholding this targeted disarmament law.