Lessons From Rahimi: When it Comes to Gun Violence, the Personal is Still Political
Part 2 of a two-part essay about the Supreme Court case, United States v. Rahimi, whose decision is set to arrive soon
Caroline Light
By: Caroline Light
This is Part II of a two-part essay about United States v. Rahimi, a Supreme Court case to determine whether a federal law, 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(8), that prohibits people subject to domestic violence restraining orders from possessing firearms, is in violation of the Second Amendment.
Part I, The Path to Rahimi - a Timeline
Rahimi places the gender implications of “gun rights” in stark relief. If the goal of the “gun rights” agenda is the full deregulation of guns — including the unfettered circulation of firearms into public space, based on the spurious belief that guns are necessary for individual self-defense — then one major challenge is widespread support for the disarmament of people who are threatening to the safety of others.
At stake in Rahimi is the constitutionality of efforts to bar people who have committed violence against their family members and intimate partners from access to deadly weapons.
A growing body of empirical research confirms that people (disproportionately women) who have been subject to partner abuse are more likely to be killed when their abusers have firearms. More than half of women murdered are killed by male intimate partners or exes, and firearms are used in over half of all domestic violence (DV) or intimate partner violence (IPV) related homicides. In addition to those killed or wounded, there are millions of women who are bullied or threatened by abusers wielding guns.
The data provide a clear lens on the correlation of gun violence and intimate partner violence; however, until quite recently in our nation’s history, the two have been viewed as separate issues concerning individuals rather than the wider community.
According to public health policy and legal scholar, Elizabeth Tobin-Tyler, “IPV and gun ownership have traditionally been treated in American society and the law as private matters.”
Originally, many believed that what happened under a man’s roof was his private business, rather than a public concern. But a wave of feminist resistance gathered momentum in the 1960s and ‘70s, raising public awareness about the ubiquity and wider impact of gender-based violence.
The catchphrase, “the Personal is Political” emphasized the public urgency of women’s struggles with harassment, sexual violence, and patriarchal control. Given the space to share their personal experiences of violence and coercion, women recognized their collective interest in public organizing and resistance. Further, one’s “personal” or “individual” experiences of oppression were, in fact, related to larger political issues and power structures.
Largely in response to feminist demands for justice, the federal government began addressing intimate partner and domestic violence as issues of public concern in the mid-1990s, based on the idea that it is in the interest not only of individuals who experience abuse but the whole population to invest public resources in efforts to resist gender-based violence.
Federal regulations, like 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(8), are based on evidence that restricting abusers’ access to firearms saves lives. Indeed, multiple studies show that removing firearms from people subject to DV restraining orders significantly reduces intimate partner homicides.
But the life-saving benefits of these regulations do not accrue only to individuals. Research on mass shootings reveals the connections between violence that takes place in so-called “private spaces” and wider public health and safety concerns. This pattern was clear when researchers Lisa B. Geller, Marisa Booty, and Cassandra K. Crifasi looked closely at the Gun Violence Archive’s data on mass shootings. They discovered that 59.1% of mass shootings were related to domestic violence; and in 68.2% of mass shootings, the perpetrator either killed a partner or family member or had a history of domestic violence.
In case after tragic case, so-called “private” gun violence very often foreshadows “public” gun violence.
This direct, empirically proven connection between private and public violence did not concern the 5th Circuit judges who decided that Zackey Rahimi should not have had his guns taken from him, even temporarily.
According to the judges, 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(8) is unconstitutional based on a selective interpretation of history — that there were no legal analogues at the time the Constitution was drafted — and an overly capacious interpretation of the Second Amendment as protecting an individual right to “have and bear” firearms for self-defense. According to legal scholar Mary Anne Franks, this selective interpretation of the Constitution “sanctif[ies] gun culture, to the detriment of women, children, and minorities.”
Given the Supreme Court’s veneration of life in Dobbs, Rahimi’s stakes are high, even if the Court sees fit to uphold 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(8) while clarifying Bruen’s historical test. In the context of its recent decisions, the case illuminates the cynical hypocrisy of defending firearm deregulation while overturning reproductive rights.
According to Franks, whose Amicus Brief enumerates multiple sites of Constitutional distortion, “The threat to currently existing life posed by the possession of firearms, especially in the hands of domestic abusers, provides sufficient reason to correct the fifteen years of misguided precedent since Heller.” Justice Alito’s majority decision in Dobbs — based on an appeal to fetuses’ “most basic human right - to live” — proves disingenuous given the scourge of armed abusers who threaten the lives of pregnant and postpartum people and the fact that firearms are the leading cause of death for children in the U.S.
The Rahimi case is the predictable, tragic culmination of decades of legal and cultural manipulation by the “gun rights” lobby and their allies on the nation’s highest court. Rahimi reflects the persuasive power of the Firehose of Falsehood, the groundless mythology that firearms are essential tools of self-defense, which fuels our ostensibly intractable gun violence problem.
When a significant percentage of our public has been convinced that “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” and when a majority of our Supreme Court justices are willing to distort the Second Amendment to fit the tortured logics of Armed Citizenship, we are primed to succumb to panic instead of embracing evidence-based reason.
Lest we need more examples, the case proves that firearm violence is tethered to larger power structures. It turns out that our personal, seemingly private tragedies have grave implications for all.
Caroline Light is the Director of Undergraduate Studies in Harvard’s Program in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Her book, Stand Your Ground: A History of America’s Love Affair with Lethal Self-Defense (Beacon Press, 2017) provides a critical genealogy of our nation’s ideals of armed citizenship.
Author photo courtesy of Caroline Light.