Soon after an appeals court struck down a federal law barring domestic abusers from owning firearms, a women’s shelter in Houston said its clients began receiving images of their abusers waving guns at the camera.

The message, the Houston Area Women’s Center said, was clear: Abusers were sending “a message of intimidation without even firing their weapons,” and leaving their victims to “live in fear of their power.”

The shelter has joined a chorus of voices asking the Supreme Court to overturn the lower court ruling and revive the long-standing law, saying the real-world effects are unfathomably bad.

The case, which the justices are slated to hear in their next term beginning in October, is shaping up as the next critical test of gun rights.

It comes after a 2022 ruling, the Bruen case, in which the court’s conservative majority vehemently reaffirmed the Second Amendment right of an individual to bear arms and said restrictions on that right must have been contemplated at the time the amendment was debated and ratified in the late 18th century.

Bruen was hailed a victory by gun-rights supporters.

But gun-control advocates have said it’s created a dangerous situation for lower courts to unravel as they try to figure out what to do with the federal Gun Control Act, which bars gun possession or purchase by felons, fugitives, illegal immigrants, the mentally ill, drug users and those who have been convicted of domestic violence or are subject to a current court restraining order after stalking, harassing or threatening a partner.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in March that the restraining order section is unconstitutional, citing the high court’s 2022 ruling.

Now women’s rights groups are feverishly working to get the justices to overturn the appeals court and restore the law.

“In homes with domestic violence victims, safety means protection from guns. The statistics are staggering, and the Court will be inundated with them,” the Houston shelter told the justices. “There is no debate that people suffering domestic abuse are largely women and children, and that their risk of injury, death, and extreme psychological abuse from threats and coercion, is far greater when their abuser possesses a firearm.”

The center said that even in the founding era, authorities retained the right to remove firearms from the hands of dangerous people. The center said that same principle should cover people whom a court has deemed to be a risk for abusing a domestic partner.

The case that’s reached the high court involves Zackey Rahimi, who was facing a domestic violence restraining order after being accused of assaulting an ex-girlfriend. He was then involved in a series of shootings around Arlington, Texas, and when officers swooped in to get him at his home they found a rifle and a pistol.

Federal prosecutors charged him with possession of a firearm while facing a restraining order.

Rahimi challenged the indictment.

In a 2022 ruling the 5th Circuit rejected his challenge, but after the Supreme Court’s Bruen ruling, Rahimi renewed his challenge and the 5th Circuit reversed itself.

The circuit judges said the situation would have been different if Rahimi had been convicted of a crime. But the judges said a restraining order didn’t place Rahimi on the wrong side of the law as far as the Constitution’s right to bear arms.

Judge James C. Ho, a Trump appointee, said the answer to dangerous persons is to prosecute them.

“The power to incarcerate violent criminals is not just constitutionally permissible — it’s imperative to protecting victims. After all, anyone who’s willing to break the law when it comes to domestic violence is presumably willing to break the law when it comes to guns as well,” Judge Ho wrote.

The Biden administration, in its brief to the Supreme Court, said the lower court misread history.

“Colonial and early state legislatures likewise disarmed individuals who ‘posed a potential danger’ to others,” Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar said.

The Houston women’s shelter said the connection between domestic abusers and guns cries out for answers. The shelter said that 73% of slayings of domestic partners in Houston from 2019 to 2022 involved guns.

The shelter was part of a wave of interest groups urging the justices to reverse the lower court. They ranged from the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to Democratic members of Congress.

“Abused victims are precisely the people whom a just government is tasked with protecting. The Second Amendment does not stand as a barrier to their safety,” the bishops said.

Adam Winkler, a law professor at the University of California - Los Angeles, said data, research and common sense supports the claims made by the shelter against domestic violence offenders.

“One of the most dangerous demographics to possess firearms is domestic abusers. We have a lot of research that shows people who engage in domestic abuse should not have firearms,” he said.  

“They are an especially dangerous group of people. They have a proven track record of being dangerous and unlike say felony convictions, which could be for a nonviolent offense, domestic abuse by definition is a violent activity, so prohibiting people with a known propensity to violence is probably a good idea,” Mr. Winkler added.

Steven Schwinn, a law professor at the University of Illinois - Chicago, said the case to ban domestic abusers from possessing firearms is spot on in exposing the weakness from the high court’s decision with respect to Bruen and prior pro-Second Amendment precedent.

“Using history as the touchstone for Second Amendment rights binds us to, well, history, where certain populations (like DV survivors) get the extreme short end of the stick and where we (as a society) haven’t properly understood serious problems like domestic violence,” Mr. Schwinn said in an email to The Washington Times.

“In other words, the Bruen methodology limits gun regulation to what we understood of social relations in decades and centuries past; it does not account for our modern understanding. And this case illustrates that problem with Bruen as well as any,” he added.

Joseph Blocher, a law professor at Duke University, said he thinks the justices may have taken the domestic violence case up so quickly after issuing the Bruen decision because they’re aware of the need to clarify its holding.

“I have to think that the justices’ willingness to hear another Second Amendment case so quickly on the heels of Bruen signals their awareness of the chaos in the lower courts and hopefully a willingness to clarify or modify the test accordingly,” he said.

Rahimi’s lawyer declined to comment for this story, but in a brief to the justices, his legal team said the bar on ownership went too far.

“This law would have been unthinkable to the founding generation and to most of the Congresses convened in our nation’s history,” the lawyers wrote.

• Stephen Dinan contributed to this story.

• Alex Swoyer can be reached at aswoyer@washingtontimes.com.