Supreme Court to Decide on Domestic Violence and Guns
Report and photos by Phil Pasquini

Washington: The Supreme Court heard arguments on November 8 in considering a section of federal law “ which prohibits the possession of firearms by persons subject to domestic-violence restraining orders, violates the Second Amendment on its face.”   

As the court heard oral arguments in US v Rahimi, 22-915, outside of the building a rally was being held calling on the court to uphold the 30-year-old law that is designed to protect women, children, relatives and communities from the preventable deaths in these cases.

Zackey Rahimi is a Texas man who lived near Ft Worth, hit his girlfriend during an argument in a parking lot and later, threatening to shoot her,  then fired a gun at a witness in December 2019, according to court papers. Later, Rahimi called the girlfriend and threatened to shoot her if she told anyone about the assault.

America’s fixation with the Second Amendment, the strong gun lobby and the court’s conservative preference in not restricting firearms vis-a-vis in any manner whatsoever, will all factor into the court’s final decision in the case. According to courtroom observers during the oral arguments, “The justices peppered Rahimi’s lawyer, J. Matthew Wright, with skeptical questions that seemed to foretell the outcome.” While that may indicate that the court is in favor of upholding the law, by reading tea leaves, a final decision is not expected until mid-2024.

This present case ironically comes before the court less than two weeks after the mass shooting in Lewistown, Maine that saw eighteen people gunned down by yet another deranged gunman with a semi-automatic weapon who terrorized an entire community and region for several days. And as per the usual in the aftermath, the matter of gun control and sensible gun control laws once again has been raised in a nation awash in guns and violence.

According to statistics reported by the Guardian, in 2021, in the US “every sixteen hours a woman is shot and killed by a current or former intimate partner.” Many of those shootings were committed by individuals who were legally prohibited to possess a firearm under this law. Unfortunately, homicides by firearm of intimate partners have been rising annually with deaths of women accounting for two-thirds of all cases in 2020. During the pandemic a significant rise was again seen in such cases.

One protester held a sign noting that abuser’s access to a gun makes women five times more likely that they will be killed in a domestic violence incident. A horrific statistic by any measure.

Several speakers, all women, discussed their firsthand experiences of being shot by their intimate partner abusers and the effect it has had on their lives. Among the crowd, too, were parents whose children had been killed in domestic violence along with other supporters of gun control in its many forms, including sensible gun laws.

The most well-known speaker from personal experience of having been shot was former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, a gun control advocate, who was shot in the head during an assassination attempt in Arizona in 2012. Giffords, who has made a remarkable recovery since that time, spoke briefly encouraging the court to uphold the law.

Several other domestic violence victims who were shot by intimate partners addressed the crowd with one woman relating her personal experience when she was shot by her ex-husband in front of their four-year-old child. The young boy, while unharmed physically, was traumatized and presently at age fifteen, spoke of that fateful day the effects of which still live but thankfully are diminishing with the passing of time.

(Phil Pasquini is a freelance journalist and photographer. His reports and photographs appear in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs  and Nuze.ink. He is the author of Domes, Arches and Minarets: A  History of Islamic-Inspired Buildings in America.)