The US supreme court will hear oral arguments on Tuesday in a case which gun and domestic violence prevention groups are warning could be a matter of life and death for thousands of abuse victims and their families.
Tuesday’s hearing on United States v Rahimi is seen as one of the most consequential cases with which the nine justices will grapple this term. At stake is how far the new hard-right supermajority of the court will go in unraveling the US’s already lax gun laws, even as the country reels from a spate of devastating mass shootings.
Also at stake, say experts, are the lives of thousands of Americans, overwhelmingly women, threatened with gun violence at the hands of their current or former intimate partners.
One historical review I read before linked the Second Amendment to a popular uprising that had happened not too long before the drafting of the Constitution, the Regulator movement. It was a series of popular uprisings against corruption that happened before the founding of the country, and there was apparently some trouble in assembling an army to put it down. So the Second Amendment was, in effect, a way to help make it easier to put down revolts in the future, which runs completely counter to the narrative that Second amendment supporters give now that the reason they’re supposed to own guns is to protect themselves from a tyrannical government, it was the opposite intent if anything.
