--- title: Supreme Court Rahimi Gun Case: What to Know description: The Supreme Court will consider whether the government can deny access to guns for those placed under a domestic violence protection order. canonical: https://time.com/6332044/supreme-court-rahimi-guns-domest-violence-case/ author: Sanya Mansoor article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2023-11-06T19:04:23.000Z article:modified_time: 2023-11-07T14:46:54.000Z article:section: Politics og:title: Supreme Court to Decide Whether Some Domestic Abusers Can Have Guns og:description: What to know about the case United States v. Rahimi. og:url: https://time.com/6332044/supreme-court-rahimi-guns-domest-violence-case/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt31cb8b09f5fb4830/698a420bdb2987a70826985c/GettyImages-650172859.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2121 og:image:height: 1193 og:image:alt: Supreme Court of United States, Washington, USA og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Supreme Court to Decide Whether Some Domestic Abusers Can Have Guns twitter:description: What to know about the case United States v. Rahimi. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt31cb8b09f5fb4830/698a420bdb2987a70826985c/GettyImages-650172859.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Supreme Court to Decide Whether Some Domestic Abusers Can Have Guns > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. 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Brief is TIME's Washington newsletter, written by senior correspondent Philip Elliott. It explains the politics, personalities and power dynamics behind the headlines, three times a week. It reaches 85,000 subscribers with a 37.0% open rate as of August 2026. #### Where can I get analysis of Washington politics by email? D.C. Brief is TIME's free Washington politics newsletter, available at time.com/newsletters. It is written by a TIME senior correspondent who covers the capital full time. #### Who writes TIME's D.C. Brief? Philip Elliott, a senior correspondent at TIME, writes D.C. Brief. #### Is D.C. Brief free? Yes. D.C. Brief is free at time.com/newsletters. ## Video: Former Gang Leader Pleads Not Guilty to Orchestrating Shooting That Killed Tupac Shakur in 1996 [Watch (HLS stream): Former Gang Leader Pleads Not Guilty to Orchestrating Shooting That Killed Tupac Shakur in 1996](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/A4j0Xxts.m3u8) (1:50)  _Published 2023-11-02. A former Southern California street gang leader pleaded not guilty Thursday to orchestrating a drive-by shooting that killed Tupac Shakur in 1996 in Las Vegas._  by [Sanya Mansoor](https://time.com/author/sanya-mansoor/)  ## Sanya Mansoor Updated: Nov 7, 2023 2:46 PM UTCPublished: Nov 6, 2023 7:04 PM UTC  The United States Supreme Court. The United States Supreme Court. Getty Images  by [Sanya Mansoor](https://time.com/author/sanya-mansoor/)  ## Sanya Mansoor Updated: Nov 7, 2023 2:46 PM UTCPublished: Nov 6, 2023 7:04 PM UTC On Tuesday, the Supreme Court will consider whether the government can deny access to guns for those placed under a domestic violence protection order. Zackey Rahimi had been subject to a domestic violence restraining order in Texas in 2019 after threatening to shoot his girlfriend after physically assaulting her. After a Texas court entered a domestic violence restraining order against Rahimi, he was a suspect in multiple shootings, and police officers found firearms in his apartment. He pleaded guilty to violating the ban on firearms for those subject to domestic violence restraining ordersand was sentenced to prison. In July, he wrote a [letter from behind bars, apologizing for](https://static01.nyt.com/newsgraphics/documenttools/d42c96c1f881ce17/995338a3-full.pdf) his actions and saying he would no longer carry a gun, according to the New York _Times_. _United States v. Rahimi_ comes to the Supreme Court following a lower court ruling earlier this year that ruled the government cannot take firearms away from people in Rahimi’s position. The stakes of Rahimi’s case pit the safety of domestic violence victims against the nation’s broad Second Amendment rights.Advocates for victims of domestic violence say the fifth circuit’s decision overlooks public health evidence. An abused woman is five times more likely to be killed by a male partner when there is a firearm in the house, according to a widely-cited 2003 study [published in the American Journal of Public Health](https://doi.org/10.2105/ajph.93.7.1089). “Dangerous people or people with histories of violence should not have access to firearms,” says Angela Ferrell-Zabala, executive director of Moms Demand Action. The effects go beyond the home, she notes, pointing out that many mass shooters end up killing their current or former intimate partner as “part of their rampage.” Gun rights groups stress that people facing a protection order have not been convicted of a crime. “The Government seeks to turn Americans who have never committed a felony into felons based on their mere act of possessing a firearm, and claims to justify this with historically unsupportable rationales,” gun-rights groups argued in an [amicus brief](https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22-915/284207/20231004170728993%5FRahimi%20amicus%20brief.pdf) in this case. They stated that Rahimi had agreed to a two-year protective order but was not represented by counsel. “The Government focuses on the alleged criminal activities of Mr. Rahimi, with five pages of detailed facts, conflating his alleged felonies with his entirely unrelated disarmament based on a civil order,” they wrote. ### More From TIME While domestic violence protective orders vary across states, in general, “People aren't just getting them for nothing. Judges aren't just handing them out like candy,” says Kelly Roskam, the director of law and policy at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions. Three requirements need to be met for federal law to apply to allow the government to take away someone’s guns: a protective order, the person’s receipt of notice of and an opportunity to participate in a hearing that led to the order, and a finding in the order that the person represents a credible threat to the partner or child, or is prohibited from using or threatening to use force against them. The Supreme Court could also use the _Rahimi_ case to address a broader question of Second Amendment interpretation andhow closely the nation’s laws should be compared to the way firearms were regulated in 1791. In the court’s 2022 [decision in _New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen_](https://time.com/6190411/guns-supreme-court-new-york/), the Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution protects the right to carry a handgun for self-defense outside of the home. It also imposed a general test for gun restrictions that includes evaluating whether a measure would be “consistent with this nation’s historical tradition.” Bruen’s new standard “introduced a lot of uncertainty and divergent results in the lower courts,” says Joseph Blocher, a professor at Duke University School of Law and gun rights expert. “It's quite hard for judges, lawyers and law clerks to figure out what regulatory traditions were in 1791 when the categories of rights holders and the kinds of weapons available were just so different.” In this case, for example, laws banning the use of firearms in domestic violence did not exist at the time the Second Amendment was ratified. So lawyers may look for other parallels, such as restrictions on the possession of weapons by people who were found to be dangerous. “Domestic violence has been around for a very long time,” says Roskam. “And yet we don't see laws specific to disarming domestic abusers at the founding.” (That’s not surprising, Roskam says, given how rare domestic homicide by firearm was at that time.) In Tuesday’s case, the Supreme Court will have the opportunity to weigh how that should factor in to modern gun laws. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/6332044/supreme-court-rahimi-guns-domest-violence-case/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/6332044/supreme-court-rahimi-guns-domest-violence-case/"},"headline":"Supreme Court to Decide Whether Some Domestic Abusers Can Have Guns","datePublished":"2023-11-06T19:04:23.000Z","dateModified":"2023-11-07T14:46:54.000Z","description":"What to know about the case United States v. 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