The Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Rahimi, released Friday, is a rare bit of good news for advocates of gun control, not to mention victims of domestic violence. But the sweeping pro–Second Amendment opinion that Justice Clarence Thomas authored two years ago still threatens many state and federal statutes that regulate who can carry a gun.

Thomas’ opinion in Bruen v. New York Pistol and Rifle Association, which reads more like a political screed than a SCOTUS decision, held that all gun regulations are “presumptively unconstitutional” and can remain in place only if their defenders can show that a historically analogous law existed in the 18th century, when the country was founded. Rahimi does not fix many of the problems that Bruen’s sloppy and unworkable “history and tradition” test created, and nowhere is that more apparent than in state criminal courts.

In December 2019, Zackey Rahimi’s girlfriend, identified in court documents as “CM,” sought a protective order after Rahimi dragged her across a parking lot, slammed her into a car, then fired his gun in her direction when she ran. Rahimi later threatened to shoot her if she reported the incident. In the months after she obtained the protection order, Rahimi was involved in five other shootings, threatened a different woman with a gun, and continued to harass CM. He was eventually arrested and convicted of having a gun while subject to a protective order, as well as several other crimes.

Then came SCOTUS’s decision in Bruen, and Rahimi appealed. Given that there were no laws at the founding that would have disarmed Rahimi for threatening his romantic partner, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned his conviction. The government appealed.

SCOTUS’s decision in Rahimi walks a fine line. With an 8–1 majority, it upholds a federal statute that makes it a crime for a person to possess a gun when he is the subject of a domestic protection-from-abuse order, but it does not give up on the Bruen test. Instead, the opinion concludes that founding-era laws that restrained individuals who posed a credible threat to another person are an adequate historical analog for the law that........

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