Guns Are More Important To Justice Clarence Thomas Than Women's Lives

Justice Thomas was the sole dissenter Friday to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling allowing police to take guns away from domestic violence abusers, mostly men, who pose a threat to victims, mostly women.

Clarence Thomas’ mother, Leola Williams.

After graduating from law school, I volunteered for a year for a domestic violence agency helping women who were abused by intimate partners to get civil restraining orders.

I remember a man standing in the hallway outside the courtroom pounding his fist into his hand. He was menacing my client, his young wife, who had red fingerprints around her neck from where he had tried to strangle her the night before.

This man should have been in jail for assault and/or attempted murder but clearly wasn’t. This was 1992 in Pittsburgh, PA.

His parents had given him money to hire an attorney, whose only concern that police had taken his client’s guns away. The woman, who escaped with nothing but the clothes on her back and their young child, just wanted her husband to leave her alone.

Sigh of Relief

So it was with a sigh of relief that I read the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling Friday in the case of United States v. Rahimi. The majority said the government may disarm a Texas man who was subject to a domestic violence order. (Cont.)