In United States v. Rahimi, decided June 21, 2024, the Supreme Court ruled 8-1 that the federal government can prohibit people subject to domestic violence restraining orders from possessing firearms. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion upholding 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(8), which makes it a felony for someone under a qualifying protective order to have a gun. Justice Clarence Thomas was the sole dissenter. The decision reversed the Fifth Circuit and clarified how courts should apply the historical test the Court had announced two years earlier in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen.
How the Case Got to the Court
Zackey Rahimi assaulted his girlfriend in a Texas parking lot in December 2019, then fired a gun at a bystander who witnessed the attack. A Texas state court entered a protective order against him in February 2020, finding he had committed family violence and was likely to do so again. The order suspended his handgun license and warned that possessing firearms could bring federal felony charges.
Over the next several weeks, Rahimi was involved in five separate shootings. Police searched his home, found a pistol, a rifle, ammunition, and a copy of the protective order, and a federal grand jury indicted him under § 922(g)(8). Rahimi challenged the statute on Second Amendment grounds. The Fifth Circuit sided with him, calling § 922(g)(8) “an outlier that our ancestors would never have accepted” because the government could not point to sufficiently similar historical firearm regulations.1United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. United States v. Rahimi The Supreme Court took the case to decide whether the statute survives under Bruen.
What Section 922(g)(8) Actually Prohibits
The federal law at the center of the case makes it a crime to possess a firearm or ammunition while subject to a qualifying domestic violence protective order. Three conditions all have to be met before the ban applies.2Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 18 USC 922 – Unlawful Acts
- The person received actual notice of the hearing and had a chance 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 in reasonable fear of bodily injury.
- The order either includes a finding that the person is a credible threat to an intimate partner or child, or it explicitly prohibits the use or threatened use of physical force against them.
“Intimate partner” is narrower than many readers assume. It reaches current or former spouses, someone with whom the person shares a child, and someone with whom they currently or formerly lived. A dating partner who never lived with the person and shares no children falls outside this particular statute, though other federal firearms provisions added by the Violence Against Women Act of 2022 may reach dating relationships separately.
The maximum penalty is 15 years in federal prison.3Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 18 USC 924 – Penalties And because a conviction is itself a felony, it triggers the separate lifetime firearms ban under § 922(g)(1). One violation of a temporary restriction can become a permanent one.
The Bruen Question the Court Had to Answer
Bruen, decided in 2022, rewrote how courts evaluate Second Amendment challenges. When conduct falls within the Amendment’s plain text, the Constitution presumptively protects it, and the government must show that any regulation is “consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”4Congress.gov. Amdt2.6 Bruen and Concealed-Carry Licenses Interest-balancing was off the table. Lower courts spent the next two years sifting through founding-era and Reconstruction-era records, often reaching opposite conclusions on the same categories of law.
Rahimi was the Court’s first chance to say how flexible that historical test was meant to be.
The Majority’s Reasoning
The core holding is narrow and specific. When a court has found that someone poses a credible threat to the physical safety of another person, temporarily disarming that individual is consistent with the Second Amendment.5Supreme Court of the United States. United States v. Rahimi Roberts framed the analysis around dangerousness, writing that “since the founding, our Nation’s firearm laws have included provisions preventing individuals who threaten physical harm to others from misusing firearms.”
The most consequential part of the opinion is methodological. The majority said the Bruen test does not require the government to produce a “dead ringer” or a “historical twin” for a modern regulation. The modern law only has to be “relevantly similar” to historical regulations in both why it burdens the right and how it does so. That clarification loosens what many lower courts had treated as a demand for near-identical historical matches.
The Historical Analogues
The majority pointed to two categories of founding-era law. The first was surety laws, which allowed a magistrate to require someone suspected of being likely to commit violence to post a bond. Failure to post meant jail; posting followed by violence meant forfeiture. These laws specifically addressed spousal abuse and the misuse of firearms.6Legal Information Institute. United States v. Rahimi
The second category was “going armed” laws, which punished people who carried weapons in ways that terrorized the public. Violators could forfeit their arms and face imprisonment. Neither category matches § 922(g)(8) exactly. Surety laws imposed financial rather than possessory penalties. Going armed laws addressed public conduct rather than private possession. The majority’s point was that both reflected the same underlying principle: when someone poses a demonstrated threat of violence, the government can limit their access to weapons.5Supreme Court of the United States. United States v. Rahimi
Thomas’s Dissent
Justice Thomas, who wrote Bruen itself, applied the same framework and reached the opposite result. He argued the analogues did not carry the weight the majority put on them. Surety laws, he wrote, actually preserved the right to keep arms because someone who posted a bond could continue to possess firearms. Section 922(g)(8) strips the right outright and turns violation into a 15-year felony that permanently ends the person’s gun rights.5Supreme Court of the United States. United States v. Rahimi
On going armed laws, Thomas said those regulations addressed public conduct that disturbed the peace of the community and did not reach private possession in the home. He also raised a due process concern: § 922(g)(8) does not require a criminal conviction, does not require proof that the person actually committed domestic violence, and provides no separate hearing on whether the person should be disarmed. The ban attaches automatically once a qualifying order exists.
Where the Justices Split in Concurrence
Eight justices agreed on the outcome and fractured on the reasoning. The number of separate concurrences signals real disagreement about what Bruen requires.
Justice Gorsuch stressed that Rahimi had brought only a facial challenge, arguing the statute is unconstitutional in every application. Showing it works in some cases was enough to defeat that challenge. Gorsuch declined to bless other applications and pushed back on reading the opinion as a green light for unrelated firearm restrictions.
Justice Kavanaugh defended the use of post-ratification history and treated the majority opinion as a straightforward extension of Heller, McDonald, and Bruen.
Justice Barrett wrote that originalism does not require “a law trapped in amber.” Historical regulations reveal a principle, not a mold. She endorsed the majority’s level of generality but cautioned that “harder level-of-generality problems can await another day.”
Justice Jackson was the sharpest critic of the framework she was applying. She wrote that Bruen “conscripts parties and judges into service as amateur historians” and pointed to scholarship showing courts have reached “conflicting conclusions on virtually every consequential Second Amendment issue.” Her concurrence reads as an open invitation to revisit the historical-only methodology.5Supreme Court of the United States. United States v. Rahimi
What the Ruling Did Not Decide
The majority kept the holding tight. The Court explicitly declined to approve “in advance other laws denying firearms on a categorical basis to any group of persons a legislature happens to deem ‘not responsible.'” It did not address whether § 922(g)(8) is constitutional in every application, or how it would apply to someone under a protective order who uses a firearm in self-defense.5Supreme Court of the United States. United States v. Rahimi
There is a specific gap worth flagging. The Court validated only the “credible threat” prong, § 922(g)(8)(C)(i), which requires a judicial finding that the person is dangerous. It did not rule on § 922(g)(8)(C)(ii), which triggers the ban when a protective order prohibits the use of force even without an explicit dangerousness finding. Many protective orders use boilerplate no-force language without individualized findings, and whether those orders can constitutionally support a federal firearms prosecution is unresolved.
What Rahimi Means for Other Gun Laws
The decision arrived while lower courts were wrestling with challenges to a range of federal firearms prohibitions, including the felon-in-possession ban under § 922(g)(1) and the unlawful-drug-user ban under § 922(g)(3). The “relevantly similar” clarification gives prosecutors a stronger hand in defending those statutes, and the majority added a line often quoted by the government: the Court does not suggest the Second Amendment prohibits laws banning possession by “categories of persons thought by a legislature to present a special danger of misuse.”5Supreme Court of the United States. United States v. Rahimi
At the same time, the majority stressed that § 922(g)(8) survived because it requires an individualized court finding of dangerousness. That leaves genuine uncertainty about categorical bans that apply without any judicial threat assessment. Early post-Rahimi circuit decisions have acknowledged the softer standard but have not dramatically changed their outcomes. The next real fight in Second Amendment law is whether the dangerousness principle that saved § 922(g)(8) can extend to categorical prohibitions that never required an individualized finding at all.