Guns for abusers

Welcome to America, 2023, where the Second Amendment protects your right to possess a gun even while you’re under a restraining order for domestic violence. So says the Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, invalidating a federal law that disarms alleged abusers. Though the ban “embodies salutary policy goals meant to protect vulnerable people,” wrote Judge Cory Wilson, it is “an outlier that our ancestors would never have accepted.”

Since Wilson didn’t mince words, neither will we: The decision, if upheld, will cost lives. About 70 American women every month are shot and killed by an intimate partner.

Don’t blame one federal bench in New Orleans for this insanity. It was the conservative justices on the Supreme Court in Washington who put the gun in lower-court judges’ hands, so to speak.

Under the June 2022 Bruen ruling, out is a standard establishing that the government must demonstrate a compelling interest to protect people. Instead, Justice Clarence Thomas’ majority opinion says that to convince the judiciary that a gun law is constitutional, “the government must demonstrate that the regulation is consistent with this nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

That sound you heard was thousands of cans of worms opening across America — because “this nation’s historical tradition” is an endlessly interpretable notion. One circuit court relying on one historian may well reach a conclusion that’s diametrically opposed with another.

Furthermore, why should an analysis of historical tradition rooted in the opinions of the Founders, who often disagreed among themselves, determine the legality of laws on machine guns or high-capacity magazines, or concealed carry on subways, none of which were imaginable in 1789? Indeed, back then, married women’s rights were wholly subservient to the rights of their husbands.

“Only if a firearm regulation is consistent with this nation’s historical tradition may a court conclude that the individual’s conduct falls outside the Second Amendment’s ‘unqualified command.’ ”

Those 27 words could sound the death knell of all manner of gun-safety laws — and they could sound the death knell of countless Americans.