'Death Sentence for Women and Families': US Court Blocks Domestic Violence Gun Ban

The right-wing 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday struck down a federal law barring people with domestic violence restraining orders from owning firearms, a ruling that gun control advocates said will cost lives.

A three-judge panel of the New Orleans-based appellate court said in its decision that the overturned law is an unconstitutional impediment to the right to bear arms. The judges based their ruling on New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, a June 2022 U.S. Supreme Court decision that struck down that state's limits on carrying concealed guns in public.

The judges—who were all appointed by Republican presidents—wrote that under Bruen, the law prohibiting people with domestic violence restraining orders from owning guns "fails to pass constitutional muster," and that the ban is an outlier "that our ancestors never would have accepted."

Responding to the ruling, Shannon Watts, founder of the gun control advocacy group Moms Demand Action, tweeted, "Given that domestic violence is often a precursor to gun violence, this ruling is a death sentence for women and families in the U.S."

"When someone is able to secure a restraining order, we must do everything possible to keep them and their families safe—not empower the abuser with easy access to firearms," Watts added. "This dangerous and deadly ruling cannot stand and must quickly be overturned."

Slate senior writer Mark Joseph Stern warned via Twitter that "there is no real doubt that the 5th Circuit's decision is going to lead to more abusers murdering their wives and girlfriends. It will also increase mass shootings."

Stern noted that the U.S. Supreme Court "held that gun restrictions are only constitutional if they have historical analogs from 1791 or 1868. But domestic violence was widely accepted in those eras. So, the 5th Circuit says, the government can't disarm alleged domestic abusers today."

"To be clear—the reason there weren't laws disarming domestic abusers in 1791 or 1868 is because women were not equal citizens and domestic violence was not deemed a criminal offense by the men who made and enforced the laws," Stern added.

According to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, the presence of a firearm in a domestic violence situation increases the risk of homicide by 500%. Each year, more than 600 U.S. women are shot to death by their intimate partners. That's one killing every 14 hours.