Rahimi and the Future of (the Rest of) the Protection Order Prohibition

In the summer of 2024, the Supreme Court considered United States v. Rahimi. Scholars and lawyers watched with bated breath to see how the court would interpret and apply the foundation-shifting Second Amendment test it established in New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen two years earlier. Ultimately, the Court upheld the federal law which temporarily bans some protection order respondents from possessing firearms. But the Court provided little in the way of additional guidance that lower courts desperately needed as evidenced by the disparate outcomes on gun cases nationwide following Bruen. Rather, the Court opted for a narrow approach, failing to even rule on the entirety of the statute at issue in Rahimi. This article explores the unexamined portion of that federal statute—18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(8)(c)(ii)— and how it is critical that this subsection of the law also remain constitutional to provide safety to victims of domestic violence who seek protection from the courts. The article then describes how a careful reading of Bruen and Rahimi demonstrates that lower courts should uphold this subsection moving forward, as it has historically.