Lawfare Archive: Amanda Tyler on Rahimi and Taking Guns Away From Loyalists

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🗓️ 2 August 2025

⏱️ 42 minutes

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Summary

From December 27, 2023: The Supreme Court last month heard oral arguments in United States v. Rahimi, in which the Court will decide the constitutionality of a federal law that criminalizes the possession of firearms by individuals on whom state courts have imposed domestic violence protective orders. This case came to the Court following its June 2022 ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. In that case, the Court determined that whether a law violates the Second Amendment depends on whether there is a “representative historical analogue” for the contemporary law.

Amanda Tyler, the Shannon Cecil Turner Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, argued in a recent article in Lawfare that the many laws disarming loyalists that existed at the time of the Founding serve as a set of “historical analogues” required by Bruen to demonstrate the constitutionality of the statute at issue in Rahimi—a claim which has been disputed by Rahimi’s lawyers. Lawfare Research Fellow Matt Gluck sat down with Tyler to discuss the Rahimi case, the nature of the Founding-era laws that stripped loyalists of their firearms, whether loyalists were members of the American political community, why that question matters for the Court’s ruling in Rahimi, and more.

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1:21.2	Music Learn more at freshworks.com. I'm Mary Ford, intern at Lawfare, with an episode for the Lawfare Archive for August 2nd, 2025.
1:29.6	On Monday evening, a gunman entered the lobby of an office building on Park Avenue in Midtown
1:35.0	Manhattan and opened fire, killing four people and wounding a fifth before fatally shooting himself.
1:41.7	The shooting was the city's deadliest in 25 years. The gunmen,
1:46.2	who has been identified as Shane Devin Tamura, obtained a firearm legally in his home state of
1:51.9	Nevada, despite a documented history of mental health struggles, which included being
1:56.7	involuntarily committed at least two separate times in the last three years.
2:01.6	For today's archive episode, I selected an episode from December 27,
	...

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