Slate reports:

The Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to possess a gun while under a restraining order for domestic violence, the 5^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Thursday in a decision with alarming implications for gun violence in America.

What is a restraining order restraining if it’s not restraining gun-having, one wonders. Maybe it’s about table manners. No elbows on the table.

Although mass shootings and intimate partner murders are heavily linked to domestic violence, the 5^th Circuit held that the government cannot disarm alleged abusers solely because they are subject to a civil protective order. The court vacated the conviction of a man, Zackey Rahimi, who possessed a gun after allegedly assaulting his girlfriend, and invalidated the federal law that prevents alleged abusers from bearing arms. If upheld, its decision will prove lethal to countless Americans who rely on the government to protect them from intimate partner violence.

This is a horrible backward country, and it’s going more backward by the day. Soon Afghanistan will look like a utopia of equality and fairness compared to us.

Thursday’s ruling in U.S. v. Rahimi springs from the Supreme Court’s recent decision in last year’s Bruen, which dramatically expanded the scope of the Second Amendment. Justice Clarence Thomas’ majority opinion in Bruen held that all restrictions on the right to “armed self-defense” are presumptively unconstitutional

Let’s have more guns, and more and more and more. Let’s play cowboys until we’re all dead.

The law in question here is a federal statute that bars individuals from possessing guns if they are “subject to a court order that restrains [them] from harassing, stalking, or threatening an intimate partner.” The case began in 2020, when Rahimi’s ex-girlfriend accused him of assaulting her. A Texas court then issued a civil protective order restraining Rahimi from harassing, stalking, or threatening his ex-girlfriend (or their child). Rahimi agreed to this order, which also explicitly barred him from possessing a gun. Yet officers later discovered a rifle and a pistol in his home. Prosecutors then charged him with unlawfully possessing the guns and secured a conviction.

After the Supreme Court issued Bruen, Rahimi argued that his conviction was unconstitutional. In the district court, Justice David Counts—a Donald Trump appointee—agreed, striking down the federal law. And on Thursday, a three-judge panel of the 5^th Circuit upheld Counts’ decision. The panel was composed of two Trump appointees, Judges Cory Wilson and James Ho, as well as the arch-conservative Ronald Reagan appointee Judge Edith Jones.

Read the whole thing if you want to feel sick with rage.

H/t Screechy Monkey