United States v. Rahimi: Second Amendment Ruling and Bruen Test

In United States v. Rahimi, decided June 21, 2024, the Supreme Court ruled 8-1 that the federal government can temporarily bar someone from possessing firearms once a court has found that person to be a credible threat to another’s physical safety. The decision upheld 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(8), the federal statute that prohibits gun possession by people under qualifying domestic violence restraining orders, and it clarified how lower courts should apply the Second Amendment test the Justices had announced two years earlier in Bruen.¹ Chief Justice Roberts wrote for the majority. Justice Thomas, author of Bruen, was the sole dissenter.

How the Case Reached the Supreme Court

In February 2020, a Tarrant County, Texas court issued a restraining order against Zackey Rahimi after finding he had committed family violence against his girlfriend and was likely to do so again. The order included a specific finding that he posed a credible threat to her physical safety and expressly forbade him from possessing firearms.² While the order was active, Rahimi was involved in five separate shootings between December 2020 and January 2021, including firing into a home, shooting at another driver after a car accident, and firing at a constable’s vehicle.³ Police searching his home found a pistol, a rifle, and ammunition.

Federal prosecutors charged Rahimi under § 922(g)(8). He pleaded guilty after the district court rejected his Second Amendment challenge, and the Fifth Circuit initially affirmed. Then the Supreme Court decided New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen in 2022, which changed how courts evaluate firearm regulations. The Fifth Circuit reheard Rahimi’s case under the new framework and reversed, holding that no historical tradition supported disarming someone based on a civil restraining order.² The government took the case to the Supreme Court.

What the Federal Firearm Ban Actually Covers

Section 922(g)(8) does not apply to every protective order. Three conditions must all be met.⁴

The person must have received actual notice of the proceedings and had a chance to be heard. Temporary ex parte orders, issued without the other party present, do not trigger the federal ban.⁵ The order must restrain the person from harassing, stalking, or threatening an intimate partner or that partner’s child, with “intimate partner” defined as a current or former spouse, someone who shares a child, or someone who lives or has lived with the person.⁶ Orders protecting neighbors, coworkers, or casual acquaintances fall outside the statute. And the order must either contain a judicial finding of credible threat to physical safety or explicitly prohibit the use or threatened use of physical force likely to cause injury. The prohibition lasts only while the order is in effect.

The Bruen Problem the Court Had to Solve

Two years before Rahimi, Bruen discarded the old approach of asking whether a gun law served an important government interest by reasonable means. In its place, the Court held that when the Second Amendment’s text covers a person’s conduct, the government must justify any regulation by showing it is consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.⁷

Lower courts struggled with that instruction. Judges disagreed sharply about what qualified as a valid historical parallel, and the Fifth Circuit’s Rahimi opinion took the strictest possible view: because no founding-era statute specifically disarmed subjects of civil restraining orders, no historical tradition supported doing so today. The Supreme Court used Rahimi to explain that the test was never meant to be that demanding.

The Court’s Reasoning

Roberts’s majority opinion held that a person a court has found to pose a credible threat to another’s physical safety may be temporarily disarmed consistent with the Second Amendment.¹ The Second Amendment right, the Court emphasized, has never been unlimited.

The opinion drew its historical support from two early American legal traditions. Surety laws allowed magistrates to require individuals accused of threatening a breach of the peace to post bonds guaranteeing good behavior, with imprisonment or forfeiture of weapons as consequences for those who could not. “Going armed” statutes, descended from the medieval English Statute of Northampton, made it illegal to carry weapons in ways that terrified others, and empowered justices of the peace to disarm offenders. Neither regime disarmed people through domestic violence restraining orders, because that concept did not exist. But Roberts rejected the idea that Bruen demands a “historical twin” or “dead ringer.” A modern regulation needs to be “relevantly similar” to historical practice, meaning it imposes a comparable burden and serves a comparable justification.¹ Both historical traditions share the same core logic as § 922(g)(8): a judicial officer evaluates dangerousness and restricts weapons access accordingly.

The Court was careful about what it did not decide. The opinion does not address whether someone could be permanently disarmed based on a civil order, or whether firearm rights can be stripped without any judicial finding of dangerousness. The ruling is confined to qualifying restraining orders that carry a credible-threat finding.

The Concurrences and the Dissent

Eight Justices agreed on the outcome, but their reasoning diverged in ways that will shape the next wave of Second Amendment litigation.

Justice Sotomayor, joined by Justice Kagan, used her concurrence to criticize the Bruen framework itself, arguing that fixating on history and tradition ignores modern gun violence and hamstrings legislators. In her view, § 922(g)(8) would survive any level of scrutiny, making the historical exercise unnecessary.²

Justice Kavanaugh defended the historical approach as a needed check on judicial policymaking, calling balancing tests “highly subjective.”²

Justice Barrett’s concurrence may prove the most influential. She addressed what she called the “level of generality problem”: whether courts should look for a founding-era cousin of a challenged law or extract a broader principle from historical regulations. Barrett argued that historical laws are evidence of a principle, not a mold modern laws must fit, while warning courts not to state principles so broadly that they hollow out the right.²

Justice Jackson concurred in the result and was blunter, writing that lower courts were “diverging in both approach and outcome” and that Bruen had effectively conscripted judges into service as amateur historians.²

Justice Thomas dissented alone. He argued that surety laws and going-armed statutes were too different from the modern restraining-order regime to serve as valid analogues, and that the majority’s flexible reading diluted Second Amendment protections. His dissent essentially accused the majority of bending the very test he had written.¹

What the Ruling Changes

The most immediate effect is settled: § 922(g)(8) is constitutional in every federal circuit. Anyone under a qualifying protective order who possesses a firearm or ammunition faces federal prosecution, regardless of whether the underlying order is civil rather than criminal, and the ban covers all firearms and ammunition rather than just any weapon involved in the original dispute.

Rahimi also gives constitutional footing to state extreme risk protection order laws, often called red flag laws. More than 20 states and the District of Columbia have enacted these statutes, which allow courts to temporarily remove firearms from people found to present a danger. The Court’s approval of temporary disarmament following a judicial credible-threat finding supports these regimes, at least where they include a hearing and remain time-limited.²

In the lower courts, most judges have read Rahimi as softening Bruen. Several opinions have observed that if the author of Bruen is now the lone dissenter, the majority must be applying a more flexible analogy test. Courts have used that reading to uphold felon-in-possession laws and restrictions on certain weapon modifications. A minority of courts have read Rahimi as leaving the same standard essentially intact. That split guarantees more litigation.

The opinion’s careful emphasis on temporariness and procedural safeguards signals that broader disarmament schemes face harder scrutiny. Challenges to the lifetime ban on firearm possession by all convicted felons under § 922(g)(1) remain very much alive.

Penalties for Violating the Ban

Possessing a firearm or ammunition while subject to a qualifying domestic violence restraining order is a federal felony carrying up to 15 years in prison, a fine, or both.⁸ The ceiling was 10 years until 2022, when the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act raised it to 15.⁹ Federal penalties stack on top of any state charges arising from the same conduct. In Rahimi’s own case, the Fifth Circuit noted his federal sentence was set to run consecutively to his state sentences.³ A federal conviction also triggers a lifetime firearm ban under § 922(g)(1), so the consequences extend well beyond the life of the original protective order.

1
Legal Information Institute. United States v. Rahimi
2
Supreme Court of the United States. United States v. Rahimi
3
United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. United States v. Rahimi
4
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 18 USC 922 – Unlawful Acts
5
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Protection Orders and Federal Firearms Prohibitions
6
Legal Information Institute. Definition: Intimate Partner From 18 USC 921(a)(32)
7
Constitution Annotated. Rahimi and Applying the Second Amendment Bruen Standard
8
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 18 USC 924 – Penalties
9
Congress.gov. S.2938 – Bipartisan Safer Communities Act