Supreme Court’s Right Shows Cracks in Gun Case: Noah Feldman

Gun rights are not unlimited according to an 8-1 Supreme Court decision that draws back from the extreme Second Amendment decision the court made two years ago in the notorious Bruen case. The holding in the new case, United States v. Rahimi, is that the government may bar people subject to domestic violence restraining orders from owning guns.

But the real significance of the case lies in the way the court’s conservatives splintered over the “history and tradition” approach that Justice Clarence Thomas used in Bruen. In that case, he wrote the opinion. In this one, Thomas found himself ...