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

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, at least when a court has found the person poses a credible threat to another’s physical safety. Chief Justice Roberts wrote for the majority; Justice Thomas was the lone dissenter. The decision also softened the historical-tradition test the Court had announced two years earlier in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen, making clear that modern gun regulations must reflect the principles of founding-era laws but need not copy them.¹

What the Court Held

The core holding is a single sentence from Chief Justice Roberts: “When an individual has been found by a court to pose a credible threat to the physical safety of another, that individual may be temporarily disarmed consistent with the Second Amendment.”¹

Two words carry most of the weight. Temporarily: the restriction lasts only while the restraining order is in force, mirroring the limited duration of historical surety bonds. Found by a court: the ban attaches only after an individualized judicial determination, not by legislative fiat and not on the say-so of a complainant. The Court framed the Second Amendment as protecting “law-abiding, responsible citizens,” and treated a person judicially found dangerous as outside that protected core for as long as the finding stands.²

To reach that result, the majority had to explain how a modern statute passed Bruen‘s historical test. It did so by recasting the test. The government does not need a founding-era twin for every gun law. It must show that the modern regulation is “relevantly similar” to historical tradition in both why it burdens the right and how it does so. Two colonial-era categories supplied the analogy: surety laws, which forced people suspected of future dangerousness to post a bond or risk forfeiting weapons, and going-armed laws, which punished people who carried weapons publicly in ways that terrorized others. Both, the Court said, targeted individuals judged dangerous and imposed limited, individualized restrictions on their access to arms. Section 922(g)(8) does the same.³

The Federal Law the Court Upheld

The statute at issue, 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(8), makes it a federal crime to possess a firearm or ammunition while subject to a qualifying domestic violence restraining order. Not every protective order qualifies. The order must satisfy three conditions:

The person received actual notice of the hearing and had an opportunity to participate.
The order restrains the person from harassing, stalking, or threatening an intimate partner or child, or from conduct that would place the partner or child in reasonable fear of bodily injury.
The order either contains a judicial finding that the person is a credible threat to the physical safety of the partner or child, or expressly prohibits the use or threatened use of physical force.

These conditions exist so the federal ban follows some form of judicial process rather than a bare accusation.⁴ The Court’s ruling turned on the credible-threat prong. It did not decide whether the alternative prong, standing alone, would also survive a Second Amendment challenge.

How the Case Reached the Supreme Court

Zackey Rahimi was placed under a Texas civil protective order in February 2020 after an incident in which he assaulted his girlfriend in a parking lot and fired a gun as she fled. The order barred contact with her, suspended his handgun license, and warned him that possessing a firearm while it was in effect violated federal law. Over the following months, Rahimi was involved in a string of shootings across the Fort Worth area. When police searched his home, they found a pistol, a rifle, ammunition, and a copy of the restraining order. He was indicted under § 922(g)(8) and pleaded guilty, then challenged the statute on Second Amendment grounds.¹

The Fifth Circuit vacated his conviction. Applying Bruen strictly, it treated Rahimi as an ordinary citizen for Second Amendment purposes because he was under a civil order rather than a criminal conviction, and it found no founding-era law that functioned the same way as § 922(g)(8). Without a close historical analogue, the panel held the statute unconstitutional.⁵ The Supreme Court reversed.

Why the Bruen Test Needed Clarifying

Bruen instructs courts to ask first whether the Second Amendment’s text covers the person’s conduct, and if so, whether the government can show the regulation is consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.⁶ Lower courts had read that test to demand something close to a historical twin, and had begun striking down modern gun laws that lacked one.

Rahimi pushed back. Justice Barrett’s concurrence put the point most cleanly: “Historical regulations reveal a principle, not a mold.”⁷ Requiring a specific analogue, she warned, would freeze the law in the late 18th century. But she also cautioned against pitching principles so high that the right disappears. Justice Kavanaugh, agreeing, described the ruling as inching the ball forward by confirming that modern laws need to match founding-era principles rather than founding-era policies.

Justices Sotomayor and Kagan joined the majority but wrote separately to say the historical test still is not working. Sotomayor observed that “confusion plagues the lower courts” and that Bruen has failed to produce “consistent, principled results.”⁸ Justice Jackson raised a related problem: outcomes seem to depend on which historical sources the parties happen to find and how broadly a court reads them.

Justice Thomas’s Dissent

Justice Thomas, the author of Bruen, dissented alone. In his view, the majority abandoned the strict historical inquiry his earlier opinion required.

He argued that surety and going-armed laws do not resemble § 922(g)(8) where it counts. Going-armed laws reached only specific public conduct, did not extend into the home, did not impose a blanket possession ban, and preserved self-defense. Section 922(g)(8), by contrast, forbids any firearm possession, in any place, for any reason, for as long as the order lasts.¹

Thomas also drew a line between criminal and civil process. Historical prosecutions for affray or going armed required proof beyond a reasonable doubt with full Sixth Amendment protections: jury trial, counsel, confrontation. A civil protective order can issue on a lower evidentiary standard, and some states relax the rules of evidence in those proceedings. Using a civil finding to trigger what functions as a criminal firearms prohibition, he wrote, is a fundamental mismatch. He also warned that the majority’s “relevantly similar” standard invites courts to borrow the justification from one historical law and the burden from another, upholding almost any modern regulation the government wants to defend.

Questions the Court Left Open

The majority resolved Rahimi’s case and little more. Several questions were pointedly left for another day:

Whether the government can permanently disarm someone through a similar mechanism. The Court leaned heavily on the temporary nature of § 922(g)(8).
Whether a restraining order that lacks a judicial finding of credible threat, and rests only on the alternative prong prohibiting the use of force, can constitutionally trigger the federal ban.
Whether § 922(g)(8) can be enforced against someone who was subject to a qualifying order but possessed a firearm to use in self-defense.⁸

Impact on Other Second Amendment Cases

The immediate effect of Rahimi is that lower courts now apply a two-step, principles-based version of Bruen: first asking whether the Second Amendment’s text covers the person and conduct, then asking whether the government can point to a well-established historical analogue whose principles align with the challenged law.³

The largest downstream fight is over § 922(g)(1), the federal felon-in-possession ban. Courts have divided on whether legislatures can categorically disarm groups they consider especially dangerous when the category itself has no founding-era counterpart. The Ninth Circuit, in United States v. Duarte (2025), upheld the felon ban by drawing on Rahimi‘s principles-based approach. Other circuits are still working through whether the “who” being regulated must have a historical basis of its own, or whether matching the “how” and “why” is enough. That split is likely to send at least one felon-in-possession case back to the Supreme Court.

Challenges to other subsections of § 922(g), including bans on possession by drug users and by certain noncitizens, are moving through the courts on the same framework. Each raises a version of the question Rahimi did not answer: how far can the government go in disarming a category of people when no court has individually found any particular member of that category to pose a threat? Rahimi’s case was the straightforward application of § 922(g)(8). The harder ones are still on their way.

1
Supreme Court of the United States. United States v. Rahimi
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Oyez. United States v. Rahimi
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Constitution Annotated. Amdt2.7 Rahimi and Applying the Second Amendment Bruen Standard
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Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 18 USC 922 – Unlawful Acts
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United States Courts. United States v. Rahimi
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Constitution Annotated. Amdt2.6 Bruen and Concealed-Carry Licenses
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Justia Supreme Court. United States v. Rahimi – 602 U.S. ___ (2024)
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Legal Information Institute. United States v. Rahimi