The Patriot Post® · Gun Rights and Domestic Violence

Much to the dismay of the rapacious Left, the right to keep and bear arms is enshrined in our Constitution. And with a conservative edge on the Supreme Court, we’ve seen a more friendly attitude about the Second Amendment in recent years.

In 2022, for example, the Court ruled 6-3 in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen that law-abiding citizens have a right to carry a gun outside of their homes for purposes of self-defense and don’t need special permission from the government to do so. However, the ruling did not eliminate a state’s prerogative in licensing firearms, so the liberal outcry claiming the Court turned America into the Wild West is an exaggeration.

As our own Nate Jackson wrote at the time: “After the Court’s 2008 District of Columbia v. Heller ruling held that the Second Amendment has always been an individual right, and after its 2010 McDonald v. City of Chicago decision held that the Fourteenth Amendment means it ‘is fully applicable to the States,’ many states and cities nonetheless continued to chip away wherever they thought they could get away with it. Lower-court judges too often let them.”

In his commonsense opinion in Bruen, Justice Clarence Thomas reminded the Court, and gun-grabbing leftists everywhere, that we don’t need the government’s permission to defend ourselves. Indeed, self-defense is the first civil right.

Thomas’s approach to understanding the Constitution is refreshing: He looks at the wording of the document itself, reviews the debates surrounding the passage of the amendment, and then looks to see if other laws existed at the time of our founding and in 1868, when the Bill of Rights was deemed applicable to the states.

This is in stark contrast to how leftist justices look at the Second Amendment — by discarding historical precedents and original intent in favor of whatever they think the Constitution ought to mean.

Currently, the Supreme Court is reviewing the case of United States v. Rahimi, raising the important question about whether it’s constitutional to take away the Second Amendment right of people who’ve had protective orders issued against them.

According to The Wall Street Journal: “The Supreme Court’s ruling could have broader implications. The federal law challenged by [Zackey] Rahimi has other provisions that disarm other categories of Americans, including — call it the Hunter Biden clause — anyone ‘who is an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance.’ When appeals courts go looking for historical analogues, how close to an exact fit is needed? Bruen was a landmark, but lower courts and legislators could use another guidepost from the Justices.”

At least according to a couple of Leftmedia outlets, even the conservative justices seem ready to acknowledge that convicted felons and citizens with a history of violence shouldn’t be allowed to possess firearms. As The Washington Post puts it, “Justices on both sides of the court’s ideological divide seem to think the Constitution does not prohibit legislatures from restricting firearm possession among individuals who are found to be a danger.”

As The New York Times reports, the Court’s conservative justices seem ready “to accept that a judicial finding of dangerousness in the context of domestic violence proceedings was sufficient to support a federal law making it a crime for people subject to [protective] orders to possess guns — even if there was no measure from the founding era precisely like the one at issue in the case.”

Indeed, during oral arguments, Chief Justice John Roberts grimly noted that “guns and domestic abuse are a deadly combination.” He continued: “As this Court has said, all too often, the only difference between a battered woman and a dead woman is the presence of a gun. Armed abusers also pose grave danger to police officers responding to domestic violence calls and to the public at large, as Zackey Rahimi’s own conduct shows. To address that acute threat, Congress and 48 states and territories temporarily disarm individuals subject to domestic violence protective orders.”

We can’t say we’re surprised. Red flag laws and similar measures do seem to have broad public support because no one wants a dangerously unstable person to have a gun. Yet most people don’t understand the threat to due process rights these laws present in practice.

However, the good news is that, thanks to the Court’s solid conservative majority, the Second Amendment is broadly secure — for now — even if this case goes the way it seems to be headed. The justices made it clear in Bruen, McDonald, and Heller that the right of law-abiding citizens to keep and bear arms is a critical part of the Constitution.