WASHINGTON – Ruth Glenn knows from harrowing personal experience the dangers of putting a gun in the hands of a violent spouse or partner, the issue at the heart of a case before the Supreme Court.
On a beautiful June evening in 1992, Glenn was shot three times, twice in the head, and left for dead outside a Denver car wash.
The shooter was her estranged husband, Cedric, who was under a court order to stay away from Glenn. But at the time, there was no federal law prohibiting him from having a gun.
Two years later, Congress passed such a law, prohibiting people under domestic violence restraining orders from owning guns. “He would not have had access to that gun if we had these current laws in place,” Glenn told The Associated Press in an interview outside the Supreme Court.
The high court is hearing arguments Tuesday in a challenge to the 1994 law. The closely watched case is the first involving guns to reach the justices since their landmark Bruen decision last year expanded gun rights and changed the way courts evaluate whether restrictions on firearms violate the constitutional right to “keep and bear arms.
Glenn, the president of Survivor Justice Action, is allied with gun control groups backing the Biden administration’s defence of the law.
Gun rights organisations are backing Zackey Rahimi, the Texas man whose challenge to the law led to the Supreme Court case.
The law has blocked nearly 77,800 gun sales over the past 25 years, said Shira Feldman, director of constitutional litigation for the gun violence prevention group Brady.
“This is a law that works and has been supported by both Republicans and Democrats in Congress,” Feldman said.
According to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, guns have been the most common weapon used in the murder of a spouse, intimate partner, child or relative in recent years. Guns were used in more than half, 57%, of these killings in 2020, a year that saw an overall increase in domestic violence during the coronavirus pandemic.
According to the gun control group Everytown for Gun Safety, an average of 70 women a month are shot and killed by intimate partners.
But a gun is more than just a potential source of violence, said Glenn, recalling how her husband repeatedly threatened her and their then-teenage son, David.
“I think sometimes we forget and we look at the gun as this tool of lethality, which it absolutely is. But it’s even more powerful as a tool of control,” Glenn said.
Rahimi’s case reached the Supreme Court after prosecutors appealed a ruling that threw out his conviction for possessing guns while under a restraining order.
Rahimi was involved in five shootings over a two-month period in and around Arlington, Texas, said US District Judge Cory Wilson. When police identified Rahimi as a suspect in the shootings and showed up at his home with a search warrant, Rahimi admitted both to having guns in the house and to being subject to a domestic violence restraining order that prohibited gun possession, Wilson wrote.
But while Rahimi was hardly a “model citizen,” Wilson wrote, the law in question could not be justified by a look at history. That’s the test Justice Clarence Thomas laid out in his opinion for the court in Bruen.
The appeals court initially upheld the conviction under a balancing test that included whether the restriction increased public safety. But the panel reversed course after Bruen. At least one circuit court has upheld the law since the Bruen decision.
Rahimi’s case, and the issue of domestic violence, may offer the government the optimal situation to defend gun restrictions, said Hashim Mooppan, a former Justice Department official in the Trump administration.
“If the government could have picked a case to be the first post-Bruen case, I think they would have picked this case and this law,” Mooppan said at a Georgetown Law School preview of the year’s big cases.
But Rahimi’s supporters said the appeals court got it right when it looked at American history and found no restriction close enough to justify the gun ban.
They also object to the hearing process by which restraining orders can be issued, saying it does not adequately protect the rights of people like Rahimi.
“It’s kind of a truism that our commitment to due process and the rule of law means very little if we don’t make sure that everybody gets due process,” said Clark Neily, a vice president at the libertarian Cato Institute who wrote a brief on Rahimi’s side.
The Bruen decision has led to an upheaval in the legal landscape, with rulings striking down more than a dozen laws, said Jacob Charles, a law professor at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California. These include age restrictions, bans on homemade “ghost guns” and prohibitions on gun ownership for people convicted of non-violent crimes or illegal drug use.
The court’s decision in the Rahimi case could have far-reaching implications, including for the high-profile prosecution of Hunter Biden. The president’s son was charged with purchasing a firearm while addicted to drugs, but his lawyers have indicated they will challenge the indictment as invalid following the Bruen decision.
“It has the potential to be quite impactful,” Charles said. While it’s possible the Supreme Court could rule on the Rahimi case alone, “the court seems to be realising that if they rule narrowly, they’re just going to keep having these cases”.
Glenn somehow survived the shooting with no brain damage and was released from hospital three days later. But she and her son lived in fear for several months before Cedric Glenn took his own life with the same gun.
She wrote in her book, Everything I Never Dreamed, that the shooting changed her life and motivated her to work to prevent other women from suffering similar abuse.
“We’re saying the only thing that can protect them is an order of protection that says someone has to take their gun away,” Glenn said on the sidewalk outside the courthouse. “We’re just increasing the risk to them if we don’t remove the thing that’s threatening them.”