Supreme Court upholds reach of gun ban for domestic violence convicts

Domestic abusers can be barred from owning guns even if their crimes were misdemeanors resulting from recklessness rather than intentional acts, the Supreme Court ruled Monday in upholding the broad scope of a 20-year-old federal law.

The 6-2 ruling said Congress didn’t distinguish between domestic assaults committed knowingly and in a fit of temper when it passed legislation prohibiting abusers convicted of misdemeanors from obtaining firearms. Most states have defined such offenses to include reckless actions.

By linking its 1996 measure to those state laws, “Congress must have known it was sweeping in some persons who had engaged in reckless conduct,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote for the majority.

Justice Kagan was joined by two fellow members of the court’s liberal wing and three from its conservative bloc, including Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.

The decision came down amid renewed debate over who is too dangerous to own a gun and when their Second Amendment rights are infringed by attempts to bar their purchases.

House Democrats staged a sit-in on the chamber floor last week to call for tighter gun laws in the wake of the Islamist terrorist shooting in Orlando, Florida, that killed 49 people. A majority of senators signaled interest in a bipartisan compromise to bar people on heightened screening lists from obtaining guns, though the proposal fell short of the 60 votes needed to advance as legislation.

Groups that push for tighter gun control and protections for women against domestic violence praised the court’s decision as a major victory.

“Today, the Supreme Court recognized what we know to be true: No person convicted of domestic violence should have access to a gun — ever,” said Dan Gross, president of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence.

Gun rights groups said the court interpreted the law in a way that could disarm, say, parents who spank their children.

“A principle in law is that the punishment must fit the crime,” Erich Pratt, executive director of Gun Owners for America, told Voice of America. “Sadly, permanently disarming Americans for slight infractions that impose no jail time is simply not just.”

Justice Clarence Thomas, joined in part by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, wrote in dissent that Congress could have wrapped reckless behavior into the legislation but instead defined a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence as involving the “use of physical force.”

“And a ’use of physical force’ has a well-understood meaning applying only to intentional acts designed to cause harm,” Justice Thomas wrote.

Justice Thomas broke a decade of silence from the bench in February by asking a question during oral arguments in the case. In particular, he wanted to know if there was any other situation in which someone convicted of a misdemeanor could be deprived of a constitutional right.

The case before the court involved a pair of Maine men who were convicted of domestic violence and later found with guns during unrelated investigations.

In 2004, Stephen Voisine pleaded guilty to assaulting his girlfriend under the Maine criminal code, which made it a misdemeanor to “intentionally, knowingly or recklessly cause bodily injury or offensive physical contact to another person.”

Several years later, he was suspected of killing a bald eagle. Investigators turned up a rifle and found his domestic violence conviction during a background check.

The other man, William Armstrong, pleaded guilty to assaulting his wife in 2008. Authorities later found six guns and some ammunition at his home during a narcotics investigation.

Both men said their assaults involved reckless behavior and should not trigger the 1996 ban, but the federal district court disagreed, leading both to plead guilty and then appeal the issue to higher courts.

The circuit court upheld their convictions, but the Supreme Court took up the case to resolve a split with another appeals court, which ruled that a conviction for reckless assault did not trigger the gun ban.