United States v. Rahimi
The Supreme Court upheld, 8-1, a federal law that bars people under domestic-violence restraining orders from possessing firearms, ruling that the Second Amendment permits temporarily disarming anyone a court has found to pose a credible physical threat to another.
The decision — the Court's first major Second Amendment ruling since its landmark 2022 Bruen decision — also clarifies that modern gun laws do not need an exact historical match to pass constitutional muster, only a close enough parallel in purpose and method.
“Rather, we conclude only this: An individual found by a court to pose a credible threat to the physical safety of another may be temporarily disarmed consistent with the Second Amendment.”
The majority's precise, deliberately narrow statement of its holding on Second Amendment limits.
How it got here: A Texas federal court denied Rahimi's Second Amendment challenge; the Fifth Circuit reversed after the Supreme Court's 2022 Bruen decision; the Supreme Court granted certiorari.
The Case in Depth
What happened
In late 2019, Zackey Rahimi assaulted his girlfriend in a parking lot, fired a gun as she fled, and later threatened to shoot her if she reported the incident. A Texas court issued a domestic-violence restraining order finding he posed a credible physical threat to her and their child. Police later found guns at his home during an investigation into a series of shootings, and federal prosecutors charged him with violating the law that bars people under such orders from possessing firearms.
The question before the Court
Can Congress make it a crime for people under domestic-violence restraining orders to own guns, consistent with the Second Amendment's guarantee of the right to bear arms?
The Court's answer
Yes — the Court held the law constitutional as applied to Rahimi and, consequently, as a matter of facial validity. The Second Amendment does not operate in a historical vacuum: under the framework the Court set in its 2022 Bruen decision, the government must show that a challenged gun law is consistent with the nation's historical tradition of firearm regulation. The Court found that tradition by examining two types of founding-era laws — "surety laws," which let magistrates require people suspected of future violence to post a bond or face jail, and "going armed" laws, which punished those who carried weapons in a way that terrorized others. Both types of laws, like Section 922(g)(8), targeted individuals who posed a credible threat of physical harm to others.
The Court rejected the Fifth Circuit's reading of Bruen as requiring a near-identical historical counterpart. Bruen demands a historical analogue — a law similar in purpose and method — not a historical twin. Because Section 922(g)(8) disarms people only after a court finds they pose a credible threat, and only for as long as the restraining order is in force, it fits comfortably within America's long tradition of temporarily disarming those who threaten others.
Curious how the Court got there? See the step-by-step legal reasoning →
Why it matters
The ruling preserves federal gun restrictions that apply in hundreds of thousands of domestic-violence protective-order cases each year, keeping firearms out of the hands of people courts have specifically found to be dangerous to an intimate partner or child. It also gives lower courts clearer direction after two years of conflicting rulings over how strictly to apply the 2022 Bruen historical-tradition standard.
What changes now
The Fifth Circuit's ruling striking down the law is reversed, and the case is sent back for further proceedings consistent with the Supreme Court's opinion. Rahimi's Second Amendment challenge fails, and the federal firearm ban for people under qualifying domestic-violence restraining orders remains in force. Lower courts nationwide will apply this decision's clarified analogical standard — historical principle, not historical precision — to the large backlog of Second Amendment cases that followed the 2022 Bruen ruling.
What this does not decide
The ruling does not decide whether the law is constitutional in every scenario — it leaves open, for example, whether the government can disarm someone without a judicial finding of credible threat, whether permanent disarmament could be justified historically, and whether someone disarmed under the law could still invoke it in a self-defense situation. It also explicitly rejects any categorical rule allowing Congress to disarm anyone it labels "irresponsible."
Concurrences and dissents
Concurrence — Justice Sotomayor
Justice Sotomayor, joined by Justice Kagan, agrees with the result but continues to believe Bruen was wrongly decided. She writes to explain why the majority's principles-based reading of Bruen is correct and the dissent's demand for a near-identical historical match would make it nearly impossible to sustain common-sense gun regulations. She also argues that under traditional means-end scrutiny — which weighs government interests against the burden on rights — Section 922(g)(8) would pass even more easily, given the compelling interest in keeping guns from domestic abusers.
Concurrence — Justice Gorsuch
Justice Gorsuch agrees that Rahimi's facial challenge fails because historical surety and going-armed laws show the government may temporarily disarm individuals after a judicial finding of credible threat. He writes separately to map the boundaries of today's ruling, listing questions it does not answer: whether disarmament without a judicial credible-threat finding is permissible, whether permanent disarmament could ever be justified, whether someone could still invoke self-defense, and whether categorical disarmament of groups deemed 'irresponsible' would be valid.
Concurrence — Justice Kavanaugh
Justice Kavanaugh writes a lengthy essay defending the Court's use of text, pre-ratification history, post-ratification history, and precedent as the proper tools of constitutional interpretation. He argues that balancing tests like means-end scrutiny are a modern judicial invention with no basis in the Constitution's text or original meaning, and that using them to define the scope of individual rights inappropriately turns judges into policymakers rather than neutral arbiters.
Concurrence — Justice Barrett
Justice Barrett addresses a central difficulty in Bruen's analogical framework: how specific must the historical parallel be? She argues that historical regulations reveal principles, not exact molds — courts should not demand an updated replica of a founding-era law. Demanding overly specific analogues freezes modern law in 18th-century policy choices and wrongly assumes founding-era legislatures maximally exercised all the regulatory power they had. The principle that threatening individuals may be disarmed is the right level of generality to apply here.
Concurrence — Justice Jackson
Justice Jackson joins the ruling but uses the occasion to flag a systemic problem: lower courts are struggling with Bruen's history-and-tradition test, producing widely divergent and often irreconcilable results. She argues the blame may lie with the Court itself for adopting an unclear standard, and urges the Court to remain mindful of workability when it adopts new constitutional tests — lawmakers, litigants, judges, and the public all deserve clarity.
Dissent — Justice Thomas
“Not a single historical regulation justifies the statute at issue, 18 U. S. C. §922(g)(8). Therefore, I respectfully dissent.”Justice Thomas opening his dissent with the core objection: no founding-era law is a close enough match to uphold the statute.
Justice Thomas argues that not a single historical regulation is sufficiently similar to Section 922(g)(8) to justify it. Surety laws did not strip gun rights — a person who posted a bond kept all his firearms; the only penalty for breach was a fine. Going-armed laws addressed public terror, not the private interpersonal domestic violence Section 922(g)(8) targets, and they were criminal statutes requiring proof of past conduct. The majority's approach of mixing pieces of two different laws to construct a composite analogue is unsupported by Bruen and creates a dangerous blank check for future disarmament.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- Under the Bruen framework — the test the Court adopted in 2022 for evaluating gun regulations — the government must show that a challenged law is 'consistent with the Nation's historical tradition of firearm regulation.' The inquiry asks not whether history provides an identical law, but whether the challenged regulation is 'relevantly similar' to founding-era laws in both its purpose (why it burdens the right) and its method (how it does so).
- Because Rahimi brought a facial challenge — the hardest type to win, requiring him to show the law is invalid in every possible application — the government only needed to prove the law was constitutional in at least some circumstances. The Court identified Rahimi's own case as sufficient: his restraining order included a judicial finding that he posed a credible physical threat to his former partner.
- The Court identified two founding-era legal regimes as close historical parallels. 'Surety laws' allowed magistrates to require individuals suspected of future violence to post a financial bond, with imprisonment if they refused; if they later breached the peace, the bond was forfeited. These laws expressly covered domestic-violence situations and often required a judicial determination before any burden was imposed.
- The 'going armed' laws — a subset of the ancient common-law prohibition on affrays (fighting or threatening the public) — authorized punishment, including forfeiture of weapons and imprisonment, for those who carried dangerous weapons in a way that terrorized others. Several states codified these laws, and they applied after a judicial or quasi-judicial determination of threatening conduct.
- Section 922(g)(8) is 'relevantly similar' to both regimes: like the surety laws, it requires a prior judicial finding of credible physical threat before any burden is imposed, and its restriction is temporary (lasting only while the restraining order is in effect); like the going-armed laws, it addresses the use of weapons to threaten the physical safety of specific people. The modern law need not precisely replicate these historical predecessors — it need only share their underlying principle.
- The Court rejected two additional arguments: the Fifth Circuit's conclusion that Bruen demands a 'historical twin' was flatly wrong — Bruen requires only a 'historical analogue.' And the government's separate theory that Rahimi could be disarmed simply because he is not 'responsible' was rejected as vague, undefined, and unsupported by the Court's prior decisions, which used that term only to describe those who clearly enjoy Second Amendment rights, not to define who lacks them.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Reaffirms New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn., Inc. v. Bruen (597 U.S. 1)
Court applies and builds on Bruen's historical-tradition test, clarifying it requires analogues not exact historical twins.
Reaffirms District of Columbia v. Heller (554 U.S. 570)
Court relies on Heller's holding that the Second Amendment right, though fundamental, is not unlimited.