Supreme Court to Hear Major Guns Case Involving Domestic Violence
After a judge rejected his Second Amendment challenge to the law, he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to more than six years in prison. The Fifth Circuit initially affirmed his conviction in a short decision, rebuffing the argument that the law violated the Second Amendment in a footnote.
But the appeals court reversed course after the Bruen decision last June.
The Fifth Circuit rejected a variety of old laws identified by the government as possible historical analogues, saying they did not sufficiently resemble the one concerning domestic-violence orders. Many of them, Judge Cory T. Wilson wrote for the panel, “disarmed classes of people considered to be dangerous, specifically including those unwilling to take an oath of allegiance, slaves and Native Americans.” That was different, he wrote, from domestic-violence orders, which make case-by-case judgments about a particular individual’s dangerousness.
Judge Wilson, who was appointed by Mr. Trump, wrote that the government’s insistence that it could disarm people who were not law-abiding “admits to no true limiting principle.”
“Could speeders be stripped of their right to keep and bear arms?” he asked. “Political nonconformists? People who do not recycle or drive an electric vehicle?”
Judge Wilson acknowledged that the federal law at issue in the case “embodies salutary policy goals meant to protect vulnerable people in our society.” But he said the approach required by the Bruen decision did not allow courts to weigh the benefits of the law against its burdens. What was significant, he wrote, quoting that decision, was that “our ancestors would never have accepted” the law on domestic-violence orders.
Source: The New York Times
