[Source: Reuters]

When a New Orleans-based appeals court struck down a federal law aimed at protecting victims of domestic violence from firearms – a matter that the U.S. Supreme Court takes up on Tuesday – Phil Sorrells, the conservative gun-owning Tarrant County district attorney in Texas, disagreed.

“When they’re involved in this intimate partner violence, they don’t need to have access to weapons that are going to ramp up this violence even more,” Sorrells said in an interview. “We think that this is a small restriction on your rights that’s justified.”

The law at issue makes it a crime for a person under a domestic violence restraining order to have a gun. The case represents the latest major gun rights dispute to be argued before the Supreme Court, whose 6-3 conservative majority has taken an expansive view of the right to “keep and bear arms” under the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment.

A Texas man named Zackey Rahimi, who according to court records was the subject of such an order after assaulting his girlfriend in Tarrant County and pleaded guilty to violating the law, has challenged it as a Second Amendment violation.

In a nation bitterly divided over how to address firearms violence, Republicans and conservatives typically want fewer gun restrictions while Democrats and liberals often promote gun control. And in this case, many gun rights groups and conservative or libertarian legal scholars support Rahimi’s challenge, while many liberal and gun safety organizations oppose it.

But the case has also scrambled these assumptions a bit.

Sorrells, for instance, is a conservative Republican who filed a brief supporting the law. Meanwhile, some public defenders, who represent indigent clients and often embrace liberal causes such as combating racial injustice in policing and sentencing, have urged the justices to strike it down. Rahimi is represented by a public defender.

“This particular case involves a range of issues – from the right to keep and bear arms to over-criminalization, to things in between – that is really challenging people’s worldviews,” University of Wyoming law professor and gun rights expert George Mocsary said. “You’re getting this kind of wide-scale questioning of fundamental beliefs, and of how to deal with conflicting beliefs, from all across the political and ideological spectrum.”

The Supreme Court will hear an appeal by President Joe Biden’s administration of a ruling by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that the law violates the Second Amendment in light of a 2022 ruling by the justices that set a stringent new test to determine the legality of gun restrictions.

Sorrells, a Republican who won election as district attorney with former President Donald Trump’s endorsement, called the 5th Circuit’s decision wrong because the Second Amendment, like other constitutional rights, is not absolute.

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