DOJ seeks fast-track Supreme Court docket evaluation of ruling in opposition to gun ban for individuals underneath home violence restraining orders

The Justice Division on Friday requested the Supreme Court docket to fast-track its consideration of a current appeals court docket ruling that deemed unconstitutional a federal regulation barring gun possession by these underneath home violence restraining orders.

“The presence of a gun in a home with a home abuser will increase the chance of murder sixfold,” US Solicitor Normal Elizabeth Prelogar wrote in her petition Friday, urging the excessive court docket to determine earlier than its summer season recess whether or not to take up the case.

The fifth US Circuit Court docket of Appeals mentioned in February that the 1996 regulation was unconstitutional, and whereas the ruling applies solely to Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, advocates fear it would have extensive implications, together with that it’ll discourage victims from coming ahead.

The circuit court docket cited the main Second Modification ruling handed down by the Supreme Court docket’s conservative majority final yr that laid out a brand new take a look at for decrease courts to make use of to investigate a gun regulation’s constitutionality.

Prelogar informed the Supreme Court docket on Friday that the fifth Circuit’s reasoning was mistaken and the excessive court docket ought to take up the case so “that it might appropriate the Fifth Circuit’s misinterpretation of Bruen,” referring to final summer season’s Supreme Court docket opinion.

The excessive court docket’s majority opinion in June mentioned that a part of the take a look at was whether or not a gun restriction had a parallel to the rules in place on the time of the Structure’s framing.

The fifth Circuit mentioned, with its opinion relating to the home violence gun restriction earlier this yr, that the prohibition on alleged abusers lacked that type of historic parallel and subsequently was unconstitutional.

If the fifth Circuit’s “strategy have been utilized throughout the board,” Prelogar wrote, “few fashionable statutes would survive judicial evaluation; most fashionable gun rules, in spite of everything, differ from their historic forbears in no less than some methods.”

On the time of the circuit court docket ruling, Lawyer Normal Merrick Garland mentioned in an announcement that Congress had decided the gun ban statute “almost 30 years in the past” and signaled the division’s plan to attraction the ruling.

“Whether or not analyzed by means of the lens of Supreme Court docket precedent, or of the textual content, historical past, and custom of the Second Modification, that statute is constitutional. Accordingly, the Division will search additional evaluation of the Fifth Circuit’s opposite choice,” he mentioned.

Weapons are used to commit almost two-thirds of intimate associate homicides, the Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention has mentioned. A 2021 examine discovered that almost all of mass shootings are additionally linked to home violence.

Although a few of the states lined by the appeals court docket have related state regulation restrictions, the brand new ruling undermines a vital instrument that survivors have to guard themselves from their abusers. If the fifth Circuit’s logic have been adopted nationwide by the US Supreme Court docket, the implications can be devastating, advocates say.

“Persons are going to know that their abuser nonetheless has their gun. They’re going to proceed to dwell in absolute, abject worry,” mentioned Heather Bellino, the CEO of the Texas Advocacy Mission, which works with victims of home violence. “They’ll be afraid to get a protecting order, as a result of now that gun’s not going away.”