Supreme Court upholds federal ban on guns for domestic abusers

The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday upheld a federal ban on gun possession for anyone covered by a domestic violence court order. The vote was 8-to-1.

The decision was the first major gun ruling since 2022 when the high court broke sharply with the way gun laws had previously been handled by the courts; the decision declared for the first time that in order for a gun law to be constitutional, it has to be analogous to a law that existed at the nation's founding in the late 1700's.

But on Friday, the court majority seemed to draw that line more flexibly.

Writing for the court majority, Chief Justice John Roberts said that when an individual has been found to pose a credible threat to the physical safety of another person, the Second Amendment allows that person to be temporarily disarmed .

Dissenting was Justices Clarence Thomas, who wrote the decision two years ago dramatically expanding the Second Amendment right to bear arms as including a right to possess and carry guns in public. The constitutional right to bear arms, he wrote at the time, is not a second-class right subject to an entirely different body of rules than the other guarantees in the Bill of Rights.

Since then, Second Amendment advocates have brought all manner of challenge to state and federal gun laws across the country, plunging the lower courts into conflicting conclusions about how precise the analog has to be. Friday's ruling was the first test of how far the conservative court wants to go, and how precise the analog has to be to laws at the founding. At issue was the federal law that makes it a crime for anyone subject to a domestic violence court order to possess a gun.

The defendant in the case, Zackey Rahimi, is something of a poster child for