Hi and welcome back to amicus this is Slate's podcast about the courts and the

law and the rule of law and the Supreme Court I'm Dahlia Lythwick and I cover

some of those things at Slate and we are back on the

scotous beat this week looking ahead to a case that is keeping us up at night.

Next week the court's going to hear arguments in a crucially

important follow-on to that big gun case, Bruin, from two terms ago. So we

thought we'd go deep this week on the connections between guns, domestic violence, spousal

violence, and mass murder.

Because while this case, Rahimi, raises big questions about just how far some of the justices are prepared to go

in pushing extreme originalism upon the nation.

There are also really urgent life and death questions about guns and intimate

partner violence that we would like to answer first. In order to do that, we're

going to speak to a legend in the gun regulation space, Shannon Watts.

Watts, founder of Mom's Demand Action, became one of the country's most influential gun safety activists launching her game-changing group in the days after the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre.

In about half of the cases where domestic violence petitions are granted, guns are present, right?

And so that makes the threat of injury or death exponentially higher.

This past week, the Supreme Court heard two important social media cases testing

the First Amendment constraints on public officials who want to block their

critics from their personal social media pages as well as a rather astonishing debate on the question of whether

the phrase, quote, Trump too small and the attendant teeny tiny hand gesture that goes with

it might be trademarked.

Big sigh.

...