The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday rejected the challenge to the constitutionality of a federal law that bans the possession of a gun by someone who has been the subject of a domestic violence restraining order.
The vote is 8-1 with Justice Clarence Thomas dissenting.
“The court holds that 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,” SCOTUS Blog reported.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that, “Since the founding, our Nation’s firearm laws have included provisions preventing individuals who threaten physical harm to others from misusing firearms. As applied to the facts of this case, Section 922(g)(8) fits comfortably within this tradition.”
Discussing the application by the lower courts of the Supreme Court’s decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, Roberts writes, “Some courts have misunderstood the methodology of our recent Second Amendment cases. These precedents were not meant to suggest a law trapped in amber.”
Otherwise, Roberts explained, the Second Amendment would only protect “muskets and sabers.”
“Why and how the regulation burdens the right are central to this inquiry. For example, if laws at the founding regulated firearm use to address particular problems, that will be a strong indicator that contemporary laws imposing similar restrictions of similar reasons fall within a permissible category of regulations.”
The Supreme Court has been busy lately.
Earlier this week, the Supreme Court declined to hear a case that tried to challenge a decision from 1964 that protects news outlets from being sued for publishing damaging information about public figures.
In the case of New York Times v. Sullivan, the Supreme Court said that a plaintiff must show “actual malice” in order to sue the press for defamation. Conservative justices have asked the court to review that decision.
In the case of Sullivan, the court said that news outlets are not responsible if they publish false information as long as they do not do so knowingly and recklessly, without checking to see if it is true, Axios reported.
Steve Wynn, a casino mogul and supporter of President Trump, sued the Associated Press for libel. He wanted to change the basic case law that has been protecting reporters from libel suits for decades.
Wynn, who was also the finance chair of the Republican National Committee, sued the AP in 2018 after it published a story about claims of sexual misconduct from the 1970s against him.
After Nevada’s highest court threw out the lawsuit, he took it to the Supreme Court.
“The actual malice standard … exists to give even more breadth when you’re talking about famous people, people with power in government, or people just with more power in society,” First Amendment expert Kevin Goldberg previously told Axios.
“The bar is intentionally high to dissuade people from ever filing these lawsuits,” he added.
Conservatives on the court is still motivated to overturn Sullivan, but over the past several years, the Supreme Court has rejected multiple cases that could have provided it with the opportunity to do so.
The court does not appear to have enough votes to revisit the matter, at least not at this time or in the cases they have been given thus far.
This comes as reports have surfaced this year about a possible movement from groups trying to force some U.S. Supreme Court justices into retirement—but, so far, it’s not working.
Justice Samuel Alito recently revealed that he has no plans to step down from the nation’s highest court.
“Despite what some people may think, this is a man who has never thought about this job from a political perspective,” said one person close to Alito. “The idea that he’s going to retire for political considerations is not consistent with who he is.”
Sources who spoke to the Wall Street Journal “tamped down speculation among legal activists that the 74-year-old jurist was readying to retire so that President Donald Trump could fill his seat with a younger conservative.”
Some have also pushed for liberal Justice Sotomayor to retire. She’s the third-oldest judge on the nine-member bench and has long been public about living her life with type 1 diabetes.
Sources told the BBC that Sotomayor does not plan to go anywhere.
“This is no time to lose her important voice on the court,” one person told the Wall Street Journal, adding that she “takes better care of herself than anyone I know. She’s in great health, and the court needs her now more than ever,” a source said.
