WASHINGTON — Gun ownership rights can be denied to people who commit reckless acts of domestic violence, the Supreme Court ruled Monday in a decision that brought a blistering dissent from Justice Clarence Thomas.
The 6-2 ruling, written by Justice Elena Kagan and endorsed by conservative as well as liberal justices, upheld the sentences imposed on two Maine men who had argued their misdemeanor convictions for domestic abuse should not trigger a federal gun control statute. Thomas and Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented.
The federal law was intended to deny guns to people convicted of violent acts against family members, based in part on research showing they are more likely to use guns domestically in the future.
Stephen Voisine pleaded guilty to domestic assault in 2004. Five years later, federal authorities found him in possession of a gun after an anonymous tip that he had shot a bald eagle. William Armstrong pleaded guilty to a similar assault charge in 2008 and was found to own guns two years later.
Both men contested their convictions under the federal gun statute. They argued that the state law allowed for their convictions based on recklessness, rather than only criminal intent. They said the federal law denying guns to domestic abusers wasn't intended to apply to reckless behavior.
The justices disagreed — but Thomas, whose questions from the bench during oral argument in February were his first in a decade, said the result was a denial of a Second Amendment right.
"We treat no other constitutional right so cavalierly," he said in his dissent. "In construing the statute before us expansively so that causing a single minor reckless injury or offensive touching can lead someone to lose his right to bear arms forever, the court continues to relegate the Second Amendment to a second-class right."
Thomas' objections during oral argument prompted a give-and-take in which he asked nine questions. Like Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in February, Thomas has been a fierce defender of gun rights. The court's landmark ruling in 2008 upholding the use of guns at home for self-defense was written by Scalia, whose death in February may have sparked Thomas' verbal awakening from the bench.
Thomas has made it a rule to remain silent during oral arguments, believing that the hour-long sessions are an opportunity for opposing lawyers to make their case. He is alone in that belief. Led in the past by Scalia, the other justices pounce on the lawyers and seldom let up.
