Victims of domestic violence in the United States of America (USA) and their loved ones will continue to "be able to count on essential protection", US President Joseph Biden said after the Supreme Court left in force a law that prohibits abusers with a protective order from owning guns.
"No victim should have to fear that their assailant will get a firearm," commented Biden (81), a Democrat who is seeking re-election in the presidential election in November this year, according to AFP.
The conservative-dominated US Supreme Court overturned a recent ruling by a federal court in New Orleans upholding a 1994 gun control law that barred Americans from domestic violence restraining orders from owning guns.
The judges, dominated by conservatives, made the decision by a majority of 8:1, the world media reported.
This overturned the decision of the federal court in New Orleans, which, overturning the application of the 1994 law, invoked the fact that the Supreme Court in 2022 expanded the rights of Americans to bear arms from the Second Amendment of the US Constitution, AP writes.
However, in explaining the judgment announced today, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts, wrote that the solution from the 1994 law is "common sense" and that it is applied only "when the judge determines that the individual poses a credible threat" of using physical violence.
The only one of the Supreme Court's nine justices to oppose the decision, conservative Clarence Thomas, was the architect of the 2022 decision that expanded Americans' right to bear arms.
As the BBC reminds, in 2022 the US Supreme Court determined that the constitutional guarantee for Americans to "own and bear arms" also protects their broader right to carry a gun outside the home for self-defense.
That decision, made under the influence of the conservative judicial majority, also created a new test for the application of weapons laws, as it was stated that they must be rooted in "historical tradition."
Zaki Rahimi, a Texan who was convicted of domestic violence under a 1994 law for punching his girlfriend in a parking lot after an argument, and then threatening to kill her, took advantage of that. He was banned from possessing weapons.
He wrote an appeal that said the law did not pass the new test, and a federal appeals court in New Orleans upheld it. Then the state attorneys brought the case before the Supreme Court, writes AP.
Rahimi's lawyer claimed that he could find no historical precedent that would justify disarming people, except those convicted of a crime, which does not include people who have been issued restraining orders, writes the BBC.
The US government, wanting to keep the 1994 law in place, argued to the Supreme Court that "dangerous" individuals, such as those loyal to the British colonial government in the American Revolutionary War, were disarmed.
The attorney general's office also stated that women who live in a home with an armed domestic abuser are five times more likely to be killed compared to a situation where the abuser does not own a weapon.
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