In 2019, Zackey Rahimi drew a gun and fired at a bystander who had seen him dragging his fiancée through a parking lot. This is when his legal issues started.
Rahimi shot at the other driver many times following an accident a few months later, according to court documents. He was accused of aggravated assault after threatening another woman with a gun a year later. In 2021, after a friend’s credit card was rejected at a burger restaurant close to Fort Worth, Texas, he fired multiple shots into the air.
Rahimi’s Second Amendment appeal is currently before the Supreme Court, and the court’s conservative side and the gun lobby may find it particularly challenging. Rahimi is contesting his conviction in light of a federal provision that prohibits citizens subject to restraining orders from possessing firearms.
According to Nick Suplina, senior vice president for law and policy at Everytown for Gun Safety , “the facts of this case make it incredibly unpleasant for them to have to stand up and say, “No, we believe that domestic abusers have a Second Amendment right to their firearms.” Politically, that is quite unpopular.
In response, some pro-gun rights organizations asserted that the federal statute is still incompatible with the Second Amendment, even if Rahimi personally is an unlikable individual. They assert that Rahimi could have served time in prison for a variety of other offenses.
A test of the new Supreme Court standard: “Hardly a model citizen”
Rahimi is utilizing a criterion that the Supreme Court established last year that makes it simpler for Americans to preserve their firearms as part of his legal argument.
The conservative majority of the court found that gun rules must be “consistent with this nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation ” to withstand legal challenges in a 6-3 decision that invalidated a New York gun licensing legislation. The hunt for laws from the time of the nation’s founding that a court would see as comparable to a current gun restriction has been sparked by this.
Rahimi essentially contends that the federal statute that forbids such possession now must be repealed since there was no regulation that prohibited guns from being owned by people who were the subject of restraining orders at the time of the nation’ s inception. In March, a federal appeals court in New Orleans ruled with Rahimi, recognizing that he was “hardly a model citizen” and calling the gun ownership ban against him a “outlier that our ancestors would never have accepted.”
The Supreme Court decided to hear the case late last month after receiving an appeal from the Biden administration.
In the fall, disputes are likely to occur.
Adam Winkler, a UCLA law professor and an authority on the Second Amendment, claimed that Rahimi “in some ways is the best case for gun safety advocates.” The Supreme Court will be naturally reluctant to rule that domestic abusers have a constitutional right to own guns.
Additionally, according to federal law, anyone who has been convicted of a felony, entered the country illegally, or received a dishonorable discharge from the military is not allowed to own a handgun . A slew of lower court decisions that forbade the possession of firearms by anyone convicted of DUI, filing false tax returns, and selling counterfeit cassette recordings were upheld by the Supreme Court in 2021.
Major gun groups’ responses were muted.
That might also account for the National Rifle Association’s largely muted stance on the matter so far, despite their support for the new standard. When the case was on appeal, neither the NRA nor the Firearms Policy Coalition submitted an amicus brief. And neither answered when asked for a comment several times.
In Texas, Rahimi is protected by a federal public defender. That department declined to respond.
The Second Amendment Foundation’s founder, Alan Gottlieb, stated that his organization plans to submit a brief to the Supreme Court in the case.
Despite our lack of sympathy for the plaintiff in this instance, Gottlieb noted that the law being challenged had constitutional issues. “Bad plaintiffs can sometimes produce good case law,”
Gun Owners of America’ s senior vice president, Erich Pratt, declared that his organization is “thrilled” that the Supreme Court decided to hear the case. Pratt stated that his organization would also submit a brief “in favor of overturning the in question law.”
It’s that simple, according to Pratt: “If someone is dangerous enough that society can’t trust them with a gun, they should be in jail.” But this rule renders inviolent individuals who have never been found guilty of a crime disarmed.
