Of the nearly 5,000 women and girls murdered in the United States in 2021, 34 percent were killed by an intimate partner. Sixteen percent were killed by a non-intimate family member. But gun rights advocates think that can we can do better — and by better, I mean, giving more domestic abusers the ability and opportunity to gun down their lovers and family members.
In what has to be one of the least surprising developments of all time, the man at the center of the “gun rights for domestic abusers” case soon to be before the Supreme Court shot at a woman in a public parking lot, according to police records obtained by the Huffington Post.
In 2019, Zackey Rahimi assaulted his girlfriend and promised to shoot her if she ever told anyone. Not only did she not listen to him about that, she got a restraining order that barred Rahimi from owning guns. This did not deter Rahimi from having any gun, or from opening fire in public at least six times after that, which is why he is currently in jail.
One of those times has been referred to in court documents as merely “threatening” a woman with a gun, despite the fact that it led to him being charged with “assault with a deadly weapon.”
Via Huffington Post:
On Nov. 12, 2020, a 25-year-old woman told police that she agreed to meet Rahimi in a parking lot after receiving a Snapchat message from him saying that he “had something for her.”
When she arrived, she told police she saw him kneeling by the driver’s side of a vehicle, wearing all black clothes, including a black ski mask covering his face. Rahimi had his hands around his waistband, she said, where he appeared to hold a pistol with a magazine larger than the gun itself.
As the woman got back into her car and drove off, she heard five or six gunshots, some of which appeared to strike her car. “Vehicle was shot multiple times with the driver inside,” the police report reads.
Again, Rahimi went on to open fire in public five more times after that, and will soon argue in front of the Supreme Court that no one should ever be allowed to take his guns away.
Rahimi’s case was initially rejected by the Fifth Circuit, but they ended up overturning his conviction based on the Supreme Court’s new ridiculous Second Amendment test. The rule now, more or less, is that you can’t have any restrictions on guns if those restrictions wouldn’t have existed at some point between the ratification of the Constitution and the Civil War. You know, the good old days before they went and let any Black people or women vote.
The “Founding Fathers,” as you might have guessed, were not especially concerned about domestic violence — which was not widely discussed or treated seriously until the 1970s. Therefore, Rahimi’s lawyers argue, there should be no restrictions on his ability to own a gun no matter how many girlfriends he assaults and then threatens with a gun and then shoots at.
Indeed, the lawyers argued in a brief to the Supreme Court that the Founders were aware of the existence of domestic violence — because some states allowed people to divorce because of it, and because “In colonial New England, domestic violence offenders might be brought before a magistrate, bound over, and sentenced to a variety of punishments that often included public shaming. Whipping, a fine, the stocks, or some combination of these penalties appear to have been the most common sentences for wife beaters.” The Founders, they argue, could have made it illegal for those convicted of domestic violence to own a gun, but they didn’t. Therefore, they must have wanted “wife beaters” to own guns.
“The Founders could have adopted a complete ban on firearms to combat intimate-partner violence,” the brief read. “They didn’t.”
Again, they also did not allow women to vote.
One of the judges in the Fifth Circuit court decision literally argued that the “better” way of protecting domestic violence victims is just to incarcerate perpetrators — not, godforbid, take away their guns.
“Those who commit violence, including domestic violence,” wrote Trump appointee Judge James C. Ho, “shouldn’t just be disarmed — they should be detained, prosecuted, convicted and incarcerated. And that’s exactly why we have a criminal justice system — to punish criminals and disable them from engaging in further crimes.”
This does not, actually, seem like a very effective solution. However, despite the fact that I am deeply opposed to mass incarceration, I would be fine with giving domestic abusers the option of either giving up their guns or remaining in prison the rest of their lives so that they are not in any way compelled to use said guns to gun down women in parking lots for upsetting them in some way.
One “positive” thing this case is doing, is tearing the mask off the “gun rights” movement. Their great love of guns has nothing to do with personal safety and it never did. If “personal safety” were remotely an issue, domestic abusers having guns would not even be an option on the table. It is, and always has been, about the power to make and keep people afraid.
…of course he has a shitty beard. How could he not have a shitty beard.
During one of his violent, drunken rages my ex broke my neck in two places, damaging me permanently.
Had the sonofabitch had access to a weapon that night he would've shot me.
No one, male or female, with a history of domestic violence should be permitted to own a firearm in America, FULL fucking stop.
That we are even having this conversation demonstrates just how little value human life actually has in this nation.