Which will the Supreme Court put first: abusers’ gun rights or women’s safety? | Opinion

I once met a woman so terrified of her partner — a man who had beaten her terribly, who kept missing his court dates on the resulting criminal charges — that she sat day and night in a chair facing the front door of her mobile home in southern Douglas County, Kansas, a gun resting in her lap.

She wanted to be ready to defend herself if he returned.

A few years before that, in my first-ever daily newspaper job, I covered the trial of another woman, this time in southeast Kansas. She was so tired of being beaten by her husband that one day — Valentine’s Day, in fact — she took his rifle and shot him to death while he napped on the couch.

She just couldn’t live with the terror and pain anymore.

These women were, relatively speaking, lucky: They survived. And they were the ones with the guns in their hands. But that’s not how these stories often turn out. Nearly half of murdered women in the United States are killed by a current or former partner — and half of those women are killed with guns.

America loves its firearms. Wives and girlfriends too often pay the price.

So I’m rooting for the Biden administration, which is taking a case at the intersection of domestic violence and gun rights all the way to the Supreme Court. The case involves a Texas man, Zackey Rahimi, who was convicted of possessing guns even though he was subject to a restraining order.

This is how he got the restraining order: In 2019, he knocked his girlfriend down in a public parking lot, dragged her to his car and violently forced her in, knocking her head on the dashboard. The woman escaped, but he later called and threatened to shoot her if she told anybody about the assault.

A federal appeals court overturned the gun possession conviction. Rahimi is “hardly a model citizen,” the court acknowledged, but he hadn’t been convicted of a felony and his Second Amendment rights took priority.

Now the Supreme Court will decide which matters more: gun rights or women’s safety.

“I get the need to protect an individual’s right to self-protection in our country — it’s built into our Constitution and culture in many ways,” said Michelle McCormick, executive director of the Kansas Coalition Against Sexual and Domestic Violence. But if the Supreme Court upholds Rahimi’s gun ownership rights, that “would create exceptional danger, in my opinion, for survivors.”

These aren’t idle worries in Kansas. In 2021, there were more than 22,000 domestic violence incidents reported in the state — one about every 23 minutes — about half of which resulted in arrests. There were 32 domestic violence homicides, and two-thirds of those involved guns.

But lethality doesn’t tell the whole story, McCormick pointed out. Abusers often use the threat of gun violence to keep victims under control. That violence often spills beyond the immediate relationship: Police officers can be injured when responding to domestic calls. And America’s epidemic of mass shootings is deeply connected to misogynistic violence.

The appeals court threw out Rahimi’s conviction because of a 2022 Supreme Court ruling that gun laws must be “consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” The question, apparently, is whether the founders would have let men keep guns after literally beating their wives.The problem with that line of thinking, of course, is that the American legal system began really taking domestic violence seriously just within the last 50 years or so. The Supreme Court is regressive, but is it that regressive?

We’ll find out. At any rate, McCormick is worried that this new case will make victims more reluctant to seek help, and make life in Kansas just a little more dangerous.

“If we don’t respond well to domestic abuse,” she said, “that creates not only a danger to domestic survivors — but to our communities at large.”

Individuals experiencing domestic and sexual violence can seek help at Kansas Crisis Hotline, 888-363-2287.