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Conservative bloc

• Alito – Majority

• Barrett – Majority

• Gorsuch – Majority

• Kavanaugh – Majority

• Roberts – Majority

• Thomas – Minority

Liberal bloc

• Jackson – Majority

• Kagan – Majority

• Sotomayor – Majority

The US supreme court has upheld a federal ban preventing anyone placed under a domestic violence restraining order from possessing a gun.

The ruling in US v Rahimi will leave in place legal protections against a major source of gun violence in America. As the US solicitor general, Elizabeth Prelogar, pointed out in oral arguments in November, “a woman who lives in a house with a domestic abuser is five times more likely to be murdered if he has access to a gun”.

The judgment will come as a relief to gun control advocates who had feared that the ability to disarm dangerous people might fall prey to the radical interpretation of the second amendment right to bear arms advanced by the court’s conservative supermajority. In the 2022 ruling New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v Bruen, the six conservative justices allowed handguns to be carried in public in most instances.

They said that any restrictions on ownership had to conform to the “history and tradition” of firearms regulations stretching back to the 18th century. Gun control groups feared that the ruling might be used to unravel America’s already lax regulations.

The Rahimi case focused on a drug dealer, Zackey Rahimi, who was placed under a restraining order after he abused his girlfriend in a parking lot in Texas and shot at a bystander. He was alleged to have been involved in five further shootings before he was arrested and found to have guns in his house in a breach of the ban on anyone under a domestic violence restraining order possessing firearms.

Rahimi challenged the ban as unconstitutional, prompting the case that has now been adjudicated by the supreme court.

More details soon …