WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court’s ruling on Friday upholding a law that bars domestic abusers from possessing firearms — a rare victory for gun control advocates — doesn’t mean it is going to stop striking down other gun restrictions.
The court has several pending cases that it could act on in the next week that would give further signs of how eager the conservative majority is to continue with a long-term campaign to re-shape the scope of the right to bear arms.
How the court approaches those cases will determine whether Friday’s ruling was an outlier or a sign that it is pulling back from an expansive understanding of the Constitution’s Second Amendment.
The increased activity on the gun rights docket stems from the court’s relatively new embrace of an individual right to bear arms as first articulated in a 2008 ruling but expanded significantly in 2022.
In the latter ruling — a case called New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen — the court said gun restrictions had to be analyzed based on a historical understanding of the right to bear arms. That led to a wave of new challenges to well-established gun restrictions including the domestic violence prohibition at issue in Friday’s ruling in United States v. Rahimi.
In the latest decision, the court stood by what has been dubbed its “history and tradition” test for reviewing gun restrictions but appeared to take a slight step back from the hardline approach of the Bruen ruling. In fact, Justice Clarence Thomas, who wrote the majority opinion in the Bruen case, was the only justice on Friday to say they would have ruled that the federal domestic violence law was unconstitutional.
But it remains to be seen how the court will approach other gun restrictions, all of which have to be analyzed based on whether there is some kind of historical analogue.
Gun control advocates took some solace from the latest ruling, with Esther Sanchez-Gomez, litigation director at the Giffords Law Center, saying it showed that “common sense still needs to rule the day.”
The ruling, she added, “gives me hope” that the court might uphold other gun restrictions in future cases.
Andrew Willinger, executive director of the Center for Firearms Law at the Duke University School of Law, said the Rahimi ruli