Zachary Rahimi is someone with a bad reputation. He is alleged to be a drug dealer who has fired guns at people on multiple occasions, including at a witness to an assault on a woman who was his girlfriend, according to the protective order against him that she sought in response to that incident. That order forbade Rahimi from possessing firearms, and during the execution of a search warrant for another matter on his home, police found a handgun and a rifle. He pleaded guilty to violating the protective order and accepted a six-year sentence in federal prison.
Until the 2022 Bruen decision overturning New York State’s system of concealed carry regulation. That ruling included guidance on how gun laws are to be treated generally, stating that for such a restriction to be constitutional, it must show an analogue in the historical tradition of weapons laws at the time of the adoption of the Bill of Rights. And since, according to the case brought by Rahimi that has at last worked its way up to the Supreme Court, accusations of romantic partner violence were not a cause to disarm an American citizen in the 1790s, such a protective order today cannot bar someone like Rahimi from possessing firearms. Rahimi’s only conviction to date has been for a misdemeanor marijuana possession charge.
Rahimi’s appeal may as well have been shaped by the gods of the aphorism to fit the saying that “hard cases make bad law,” a notion that has been around for nearly two hundred years—at least—in the American courts. It is the observation that a person like Rahimi is a poor test for what rules ought to apply generally. In this example, based on the attitude that gun control advocates display toward gun owners, they would like to use Rahimi as the typal case for us all. As attorney Mark W. Smith, who runs The Four Boxes Diner channel on YouTube, has repeatedly claimed, this does look like an attempt by the U.S. Department of Justice to find an indefensible gun owner as a means of weakening the Bruen decision on the grounds that someone like that surely should not be allowed to have firearms, even if there were no analogous laws in 1791 to disarm a similar miscreant.
Is there anyone other than Rahimi and perhaps his attorneys who believes that he should have guns? This is assuming that all of the accusations against him are correct, and therein lies the problem. He has been charged with a lot. He is suspected of having committed many crimes. But he has only been convicted of possessing marijuana, something that should not even be a crime.
We can argue endlessly over whether or not the framers of our constitution would have allowed someone like Rahimi to be armed—if someone who has been so often the object of law enforcement’s attention, who has charged with multiple felonies, and who is accused of violence against a romantic partner. Sadly, prohibitions against such acts were few, and even seeing the latter acts as a crime took us a while to accept.
What we could do, however, is to deal with someone like Rahimi in an expeditious manner. He has been charged with multiple felonies. Very well. Get on with trying him. One of those felonies, as alluded to above, involved firing a gun at the witness of an incident in which he is alleged to have knocked his girlfriend to the ground and dragged her to a car. This is the sort of thing that only incurs an order of protection against him, with perhaps a charge of some crime added to the many that have already been filed against him, only seemingly to languish?
I do not know how the Supreme Court will rule on the question of whether or not someone under a protective order can be barred from possessing firearms. The current justices who took their seats after being nominated by Democratic presidents are likely to say that the Second Amendment does not prevent the disarmament of Rahimi, but the record of Sotomayor and Kagan is a list of rulings in favor of gun control, and I do not expect Justice Jackson to come to a different conclusion. The question, then, is how the remaining justices will see things. But I also find not much that is meaningful here if the goal is protecting the victims of violent crime.
The reality is that Zachary Rahimi had guns. Unless a federally licensed firearms dealer broke the law, Rahimi did not buy those guns at a store, nor did he receive them in a legal transfer. Aspects of current regulations may change, but the rules as they stand at present did not stop him from being armed. And no amount of hand wringing and no quantity of paper by itself will change that.
People accused of the type of crimes that Rahimi has been charged with—both the charge of romantic partner violence and the assaults with a deadly weapon against others—should be investigated and prosecuted in short order. Charges of that nature should never languish in the system. There should never be a question about the right of someone like this to have firearms in his possession, since he should have long ago been tried and if convicted put in prison, with any discussion of his rights being restored being addressed after several years of good behavior.
And if this means that we find ourselves unable to find the time to put pot smokers through the courts as a result, well, I detect in myself an inability to care.
Might as well be talking about New Mexico. Cases are dropped, dismissed, or plea bargained down to Spitting on the Sidewalk in the Fourth Degree. And we end up with our own Rahimi situations.