A The long-awaited US Supreme Court decision Legal experts say upholding a federal law that bars domestic violence perpetrators from owning firearms would have less impact than some hope but would still play a significant role in reshaping gun laws in California and across the country.
Laws that could be affected by Friday’s ruling include California’s ban on assault-style weapons and large-capacity ammunition magazines, both of which are facing legal challenges in the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
Adam Winkler, a UCLA law professor who focuses on Second Amendment law, said there’s nothing in the high court’s decision in United States v. Rahimi that “clarifies how those cases will be resolved.”
But, he said, the decision gives lower court judges a broad legal path to validate California’s modern gun laws — not just if they are hundreds of years old or similar to another early American law, but also because they conform to a broader legal “canon” of early American history.
“There’s no doubt that this is a major victory for gun safety advocates,” Winkler said. “This case sends a broad signal that a majority of judges are not entirely hostile to gun laws and that mainstream American gun laws are probably safe — even if they aren’t well-grounded in history and tradition.”
Other observers — including Chuck Mitchell, an attorney for some of the pro-gun advocates challenging California’s laws — took a different position, saying the Rahimi decision was too narrowly tailored but that it could open the door to even more challenges to California’s laws.
The verdict in the Rahimi case was based partly on the conclusion that the defendant, Jackie Rahimi, was dangerous. Mitchell said California has laws that allow guns to be taken from people under restraining orders, even though no such conclusion was made. He said he believes those laws are now more likely to be overturned.
More broadly, the debate over what constitutes an adequate historical basis for modern law is hardly settled by Rahimi, Mitchell said.
“The brainstorming that’s going on to determine what is adequate historical congruence has just begun,” he said.
Legal experts agreed that the Rahimi decision would do little to solve the problem. The heated legal debate over modern US gun laws,
Experts said Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.’s decision for the court – from which Justice Clarence Thomas alone dissented – was so broad that it could have been interpreted differently by lower court judges. The 8-1 decision included five concurring opinions from the other justices – each separate – from which judges and lawyers across the country will also look for guidance.
“There’s still a lot of room to interpret history however a judge wants,” said Eric Ruben, a Second Amendment scholar and fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law.
Friday’s decision follows a landmark 2022 Supreme Court decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. There, the high court overturned American jurisprudence around the Second Amendment right to bear arms by rejecting a long-held notion that governments could impose certain firearm restrictions if they had a strong governmental interest in doing so.
Instead, Thomas wrote for the Court in Bruen, most restrictions on firearms are valid only if they are deeply rooted in American history and tradition or are sufficiently consistent with some other historical rule.
The Bruen decision spurred legal challenges to gun control measures across the country. It also produced conflicting rulings in lower courts, where judges interpreted the new standard under Bruen differently.
Conservative-leaning judges have struck down gun laws by taking a narrow view of what constitutes enough historical analogy for a modern law to exist. In September, U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez of San Diego Ban on large-capacity ammunition magazines lifted in California Based on Bruen, it was determined that the two-decade-old law had no counterpart in early American history.
“Based on the text, history, and tradition of the Second Amendment, this law is clearly unconstitutional,” he wrote.
A month later, Benítez California repeals three-decade-old ban on assault-style weapons On equal basis.
“To fully bring to life the fundamental right of self-defense, every responsible, law-abiding citizen has a Constitutionally protected right to possess firearms generally owned and kept for lawful purposes,” Benitez wrote.
The State of California appealed those decisions, and the 9th Circuit were stopped Both as it reconsiders cases. The ammunition case in particular is now at the forefront of a long line of California gun cases that have returned to the appeals court as judges there waited to see whether the Supreme Court would provide more guidance on how to interpret Bruen in its Rahimi decision, experts said.
Some liberal appellate judges have already shown a willingness to take a broader view of historical precedent for modern gun laws than Benitez, and experts said the Rahimi decision has made them more empathetic to find justifications for California’s gun laws.
“The biggest question under Bruen was, how close should the historical parallels be? How similar should the laws of old be to the laws of today?” Winkler said. “The court has quite clearly loosened that aspect of Bruen.”
Roberts wrote Friday that the modern law at issue in the Rahimi case “substantially resembles” historical provisions that “prohibited individuals who threaten physical harm to others from misusing firearms” — even though those predecessor laws were not specifically geared toward domestic abusers.
This was enough to justify the modern law under Bruen, where “proper analysis includes considering whether the challenged regulation is consistent with the principles underpinning our regulatory tradition”, Roberts wrote.
Experts say Roberts’ decision runs counter to the lower court’s interpretation in Bruen’s case, which held that a very similar historical law is needed to uphold a modern law — and will have the effect of curbing more extremist pro-gun decisions going forward.
Legal experts said that was clearly the intent of the high court majority.
“The Court is trying to get out of the hole it dug in the Bruen case, and it’s requiring that modern laws be evaluated based on whether they conform to tradition in some vague sense,” Ruben said.
Still, he and others said the debate over modern gun laws will continue.
“It’s fair to say the court is applying a little bit of a broader concept of historical tradition than many of the (lower) courts that considered Bruen,” said Jake Charles, an associate professor at Pepperdine Caruso School of Law and an expert on firearms law.
But, Charles said, the Rahimi decision “doesn’t resolve a lot of open questions” about other gun laws already pending in the courts — including those about assault-style weapons and large-capacity magazines.
He and other experts said they were watching to see whether the Supreme Court would take up other gun-related cases, including those involving felons in possession of firearms, or whether it would decide to send those cases back to lower courts with instructions to reconsider them in light of Friday’s Rahimi decision.
One way or the other, experts said, the Supreme Court will have to take it up again, as lower court judges will undoubtedly continue to rely on starkly different interpretations in Bruen’s and now Rahimi’s cases.
“They will remain busy, as the differences continue,” Ruben said.
