The Supreme Court has found a gun-control measure it likes

HARD CASESAR-15 make bad law, warned Oliver Wendell Holmes junior, an early-20th-century justice. Cases reaching America’s Supreme Court often pose tricky, even wrenching, dilemmas. But after 90 minutes of oral argument on November 7th, a case testing the boundaries of the court’s recent expansion of gun rights looked unexpectedly easy to resolve. involves Zackey Rahimi, a 23-year-old Texan whose girlfriend was granted a protective order in 2020 two months after Mr Rahimi assaulted her in a parking lot. The couple had been squabbling over custody of their child when Mr Rahimi knocked his girlfriend to the ground, dragged her to his car and pushed her inside. He then shot at an eyewitness and, later, threatened to shoot his girlfriend if she told anyone what he had done. The restraining order came with a suspension of his handgun licence and a caution that federal law prohibited him from possessing a gun. Mr Rahimi did not heed the warning. He shot at several drivers, used an to fire into the house of a man to whom he had sold drugs and shot at a fast-food restaurant.