United States v. Rahimi: Holding, Bruen Analysis, and Dissent

In United States v. Rahimi, decided June 21, 2024, the Supreme Court ruled 8-1 that the federal law barring people under domestic violence restraining orders from possessing firearms does not violate the Second Amendment. Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, held that “an individual found by a court to pose a credible threat to the physical safety of another may be temporarily disarmed consistent with the Second Amendment.”¹ The decision was the first time the Court applied the historical-tradition framework it announced two years earlier in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen, and it reshaped that test in ways that reach well beyond domestic violence cases.

How the Case Reached the Supreme Court

Zackey Rahimi was subject to a civil domestic violence restraining order issued by a Texas court after he allegedly assaulted his former girlfriend in a parking lot and fired a gun. He was later involved in multiple shooting incidents in late 2020 and early 2021. When police searched his home, they found a rifle and a handgun. A federal grand jury indicted him under 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(8), which makes it a federal crime to possess a firearm while subject to a qualifying domestic violence restraining order.

Rahimi challenged the indictment on Second Amendment grounds. A Fifth Circuit panel first affirmed his conviction in June 2022, but the Supreme Court decided Bruen that same month. The Fifth Circuit withdrew its opinion, reconsidered, and on March 2, 2023 held that the government had not shown § 922(g)(8) “fits within our Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”² The federal government appealed.

What the Court Held

The majority reversed the Fifth Circuit and upheld § 922(g)(8) as applied to someone in Rahimi’s position. The statute targets restraining orders issued after notice and a hearing that either contain a judicial finding of a credible threat to an intimate partner or child, or explicitly prohibit the use or threatened use of physical force against them.³ Those procedural features, the Court found, matter: this is not blanket disarmament of the public but targeted disarmament of a person a court has already identified as dangerous.

The opinion is deliberately narrow. The Court addressed only whether § 922(g)(8) has “any lawful scope” and declined to decide whether the government could permanently disarm someone without a criminal conviction, or whether every possible application of the statute would pass constitutional muster. That restraint leaves room for future challenges on different facts.

How the Court Applied the Bruen Test

Bruen requires the government to show that a modern gun regulation is “consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”⁴ The most consequential move in Rahimi was the Court’s clarification that this inquiry does not demand an identical historical law. The government need only produce a “relevantly similar” regulation, not a “dead ringer” or “historical twin.”¹

The majority pointed to two categories of founding-era regulation as sufficient analogues:

Surety laws, a form of “preventive justice” common in the 1700s and 1800s, allowed magistrates to require someone suspected of future violence to post a bond. The Court noted these laws were used specifically to prevent spousal abuse and firearm misuse.²
Going armed laws, drawn from the common-law prohibition on affrays, punished anyone who carried weapons in a manner that terrified the public. Violators faced forfeiture of their arms and imprisonment.²

Both traditions, the Court reasoned, share § 922(g)(8)’s essential logic: they burdened the right to bear arms not across the general public but for specific individuals whom the legal system had identified as physically dangerous. That parallel in “why” and “how” was enough to satisfy the historical inquiry. Justice Barrett, in a concurrence, framed the underlying idea as a principle rather than a rigid mold: “legislatures have the power to prohibit dangerous people from possessing guns.”²

Justice Thomas’s Dissent

Justice Thomas was the sole dissenter. His position was blunt: “Not a single historical regulation justifies the statute at issue.”² He argued the surety laws the majority relied on were “materially different” because they did not automatically disarm anyone. They gave the person a choice: post a bond or face consequences. Section 922(g)(8), by contrast, imposes a flat prohibition on firearm possession with no option to retain weapons by posting security.

Thomas also criticized what he saw as the majority’s loosening of the Bruen framework. In his reading, historical analogues must be “well-established and representative,” and courts must compare both the burden a law imposes and the reason for imposing it. He concluded the government had not met that standard.

What Rahimi Did Not Decide

The ruling is easy to overread, and Justice Gorsuch’s concurrence flagged several questions the Court left open. It did not decide whether disarmament under § 922(g)(8) could be permanent, whether the statute requires a specific judicial finding of a credible threat in every case, or how it applies in self-defense situations.² The Court also did not address restraining orders that fall outside the statute’s specific criteria. Temporary ex parte orders entered before the restrained person has had a hearing generally do not satisfy § 922(g)(8), because the statute requires notice and an opportunity to participate. And the federal ban only applies where the protected person is an “intimate partner” as federal law defines that term: a current or former spouse, someone who shares a child with the individual, or someone who lives with or has lived with them.⁵ Orders protecting a neighbor or coworker with no domestic connection do not trigger the federal firearm prohibition.

What the Ruling Means Going Forward

The immediate effect is that federal prosecutors can continue charging people who possess firearms while under qualifying domestic violence restraining orders. The larger effect is on Second Amendment litigation generally. By reframing the historical inquiry as principles-based rather than a search for exact matches, Rahimi gave the government more room to defend modern gun regulations that lack close founding-era counterparts.

That shift is already playing out. The Fourth, Eighth, and Ninth Circuits have upheld the federal felon-in-possession statute, 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(1), after Rahimi, reasoning that the historical tradition supports disarming categories of people legislatures have identified as posing a special danger. The circuits are not in full agreement, particularly on how the principle applies to people convicted of nonviolent felonies, and Justice Jackson observed in her concurrence that lower courts “appear to be diverging in both approach and outcome” when applying Bruen.² A split on that question may eventually return to the Supreme Court.

For now, Rahimi sets a clear floor. When a court has individually determined that a specific person poses a credible threat of physical violence, temporarily taking away that person’s firearms is constitutional. How much further the government can go remains open.

1
Congress.gov. Rahimi and Applying the Second Amendment Bruen Standard
2
Supreme Court of the United States. United States v. Rahimi
3
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 18 USC 922 – Unlawful Acts
4
Congress.gov. Constitution Annotated – Amdt2.6 Bruen and Concealed-Carry Licenses
5
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 18 USC 921 – Definitions