Taubman Center Director Wendy Schiller recently co-authored an article for the Rockefeller Institute of Government titled "Biting the Bullet: Will the Supreme Court Uphold Firearm Removal Laws for Domestic Violence Abusers?"
The introduction of this article states: "On November 7, 2023, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the case United States v. Rahimi, which considers whether federal domestic violence firearm prohibitions are constitutional. Our colleagues at the Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium recently wrote about the lifesaving impact that domestic violence firearm prohibitions—including the types of restrictions associated with certain domestic violence convictions or those gun violence restraining orders at issue in this case—can have in instances of intimate partner violence. Nearly 20 people per minute are physically abused by an intimate partner in the United States. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control, in 2019, 607 women were murdered by an intimate partner with a gun, and that number rose to 665 in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. Nearly half of all women who are murdered are killed by a gun. And half of all female homicides are committed by intimate partners.
In this blog, we will cover the background of the laws that established federal firearm prohibitions—the Violence Against Women Act and the Lautenberg Amendment—and explain why the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals argued that domestic violence firearm laws (DVFL) violated the Second Amendment to the Constitution."