The appellate court ruling was based on a new standard set in the June 2022 Supreme Court decision New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, which said the U.S. Constitution protects an individual’s right to carry a handgun for self-defense outside the home. That ruling means that lower courts need to consider whether firearm regulations are consistent with the Second Amendment text and with U.S. history and tradition, according to Bloomberg News.
The U.S. bishops’ amicus brief stated that the bishops have an interest in U.S. v. Rahimi because they think it is particularly important to advance “the protection of the dignity and well-being of vulnerable and disadvantaged persons who live under threat of violence.”
According to the bishops’ brief, the federal law in question does not violate the precedent of the Supreme Court’s Bruen decision. The bishops’ brief said the federal law assumed that “uniquely dangerous individuals can lose their right to keep and bear arms” and added that this is a constitutional assumption. The brief argued that Congress has “legitimate authority to disarm those who have demonstrated — to the satisfaction of a juridical fact-finder — that they pose a unique danger to those close to them and to the common good.”
Restrictions on firearms “must be consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of such regulations” and this consistency “requires continuity of principles,” the brief said, summarizing the court precedent. The brief includes a consideration of how to engage with tradition, citing examples of Catholic history and the ideas of the development of Christian doctrine put forward by thinkers such as St. John Henry Cardinal Newman.
Regarding the American legal tradition of gun regulation, the brief said the Supreme Court “should clarify that the tradition as a whole is the point of comparison, not individual historical laws considered in a vacuum.”
The bishops’ brief objected that the Fifth Circuit’s decision wrongly interpreted tradition and history, and wrongly focused on contexts in which there was no support for legal intervention against domestic violence. Domestic violence victims have a claim on the state for protection, and their cause is not truly separate from protecting the social order against violent individuals.