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Between journalism jobs, I ran the state anti-domestic violence coalition in Maine. There I learned very quickly that domestic violence victims fear one threat above all others: an abuser with a gun. Abusers in a rage don’t care about the law – and if they’ve got a gun, the next step may well be murder.
That’s why Congress passed a law almost 30 years ago to prohibit the possession of a gun by someone under a domestic violence restraining order. But things got complicated in the past year, after the new conservative majority on the Supreme Court revolutionized the court’s approach on a range of issues, from abortion to guns, religion and race.
Scholar Morgan Marietta of the University of Texas at Arlington says those rulings constituted a “constitutional revolution.”
“When the court announces a new principle … citizens and lawyers are not sure of the full ramifications of the new rule,” writes Marietta. “How far will it go?”
Today’s gun case, U.S. v. Rahimi, may help sketch out the limits of those rights, says Marietta, “identifying the stopping point of the recent changes in Second Amendment doctrine.”
We have more about deadly gun violence in America in a story by criminologist Alex Knorre, who has uncovered the distressing fact that “for some youg men, it can be safer to be in the U.S. military at war than living at home in the most violent neighborhoods of Philadelphia and Chicago.”
Today we are launching “The Conversation on Guns,” the fourth book in our Critical Conversations series published by Johns Hopkins University Press. “The Conversation on Guns” explores the role of guns in U.S. society and the impacts of gun violence.
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