This one’s a retrospective. The video above and the commentary below date from when the Biden administration’s Department of Justice filed its brief in the Rahimi case, United States v. Rahimi, the Supreme Court battle over 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(8), the federal law that disarms people subject to domestic violence restraining orders. The Court has since ruled, so read this as a look back at what the government argued and why it worried gun owners, then check the current state of the law before relying on any of it.
I’m Lance Rankin, a Texas FFL. Prohibited-person law isn’t abstract for me. Every transfer at my shop in Roanoke runs through a NICS check, and § 922(g) is the list of people that check exists to catch. So when the DOJ filed 67 pages arguing about who belongs on that list, I read the coverage carefully.
What the Rahimi case was about
The Rahimi case asked whether disarming someone under a domestic violence restraining order squares with the Second Amendment after Bruen. Nobody serious was defending Mr. Rahimi as a person. The fight was over the legal standard, because standards outlive the bad actors they’re written around.
The argument that raised eyebrows
The brief’s core claim was that the government may disarm people who are “not law-abiding and not responsible.” Read that phrase again. Law-abiding is at least measurable. “Responsible” is whatever a government lawyer says it is. Critics at the time pointed out that the DOJ was taking descriptive language from Heller and Bruen, where the Court had simply noted the plaintiffs were law-abiding citizens, and trying to convert it into a constitutional test for who gets rights at all. Push that logic far enough and a speeding habit starts to look like grounds for disarmament.
The historical case was shaky too. Bruen ties the analysis to the founding era, and the DOJ leaned heavily on 19th-century laws, which courts generally treat as secondary evidence at best.
The restraining order fine print
The statute itself has two prongs, and the difference matters. One requires a judicial finding that the person is a credible threat to a partner or child. Most people can live with that. The other triggers on orders that merely prohibit the use or threatened use of physical force, which is boilerplate language that describes conduct already illegal for everyone. Disarming someone based on the second prong means disarming him without any finding that he’s actually dangerous. That was the vagueness problem critics kept hammering.
The DOJ also argued that because many states have similar laws, the practice must be constitutional. Widespread doesn’t mean constitutional, and the Court has said so in other contexts.
How it turned out
As of this writing, the Supreme Court decided the Rahimi case in June 2024 and upheld § 922(g)(8) by an 8-1 vote, but on narrower reasoning than the DOJ’s brief asked for. The Court leaned on the credible-threat finding rather than blessing a general power to disarm the “irresponsible.” So the worst-case reading of this brief didn’t become law, though the fight over who counts as a prohibited person is far from over. Case law in this area keeps moving, so verify the current status before making decisions based on it.
From where I stand behind the counter, the lesson holds up: watch what the government asks for, not just what it gets. Briefs like the one in the Rahimi case are where the next decade’s arguments get planted. If you want to understand how the prohibited-person system works in practice, my explainer on what an FFL dealer actually does covers the background-check side of it.
Lance Rankin is the owner and Chief Gunsmith of Western Sport, a family-run Type 07 FFL and Class 3/SOT dealer in Roanoke, Texas, serving shooters since 2007. Born and raised in Texas with over 50 years of experience handling firearms, Lance purchased Western Sport in 2017 and turned his lifelong passion into his profession. He specializes in AR-15 and AR-10 platform rifles, manufactures Western Sport’s own AR-15 line under the Rankin Industries brand, and runs the shop’s in-house Cerakote coating operation. When he’s not behind the counter or the workbench, you’ll find him on his ranch deep into the night, hunting coyotes with an AR-15 and thermal optics. Lance holds an MBA and personally shoots and tests the products Western Sport sells.
