The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to consider whether people under domestic-violence restraining orders should continue to be barred from possessing firearms by federal law, after a lower court ruled that the prohibition violates the Second Amendment. It's a case of special importance to domestic-abuse victims in Missouri — whose own state legislators, in their zeal to purge state statutes of even the most common-sense firearms restrictions, would leave them at the mercy of their abusers.

The case that will come before the court in its next term arises from the court's own escalating extremism on guns in recent years. The court last year struck down New York's concealed-carry licensing law, citing in part "originalism," a modern conservative legal theory that argues that constitutional issues must be interpreted based on the nation's history and traditions stretching back to the time the Constitution was adopted.

Based on that ruling, the conservative U.S. Fifth District Court of Appeals overturned the federal law that allows confiscation of guns from people under domestic-violence restraining orders — starkly demonstrating the problem with originalism: Women had few rights for more than a century after the nation's founding, and even after the 19th Amendment finally granted them the right to vote, it said nothing about a right to be free from the dangers of domestic abusers.

Recognition of the special circumstances of that particular danger is a modern development, one that would not have been conceivable to an average American even 100 years ago, let alone in the Framers' time. By originalists' own standard, then, the government is helpless to take the specific steps that modern Americans understand are necessary to protect women in this specific situation — such as disarming abusers, who are statistically five times more likely to kill their partners if they're armed.

That danger is especially acute in Missouri, which has among the highest domestic-violence death rates in the country, according to multiple studies in recent years. The state Legislature has been of little help on the issue. In severely rolling back state gun laws in 2016, lawmakers inadvertently made it impossible to strip guns from people under domestic-abuse orders of protection.

Even many pro-gun Missouri Republicans acknowledge this "loophole" was a mistake, but efforts to close it have since failed, primarily because supporting any form of gun restriction at all, even to correct an acknowledged mistake, is the kiss of political death in the Missouri GOP today.

To make matters worse, the state's 2021 Second Amendment Preservation Act holds that federal gun laws with no state-law equivalent are unenforceable in Missouri — meaning even if the federal ban on guns for domestic abusers survives the Supreme Court, it won't necessarily protect Missouri women going forward.

Since the court's conservatives today tend to blithely dismiss the real-world impact of their decisions, it's worth reviewing the facts of the case now coming before them:

A Texas drug dealer brutalized his girlfriend in a parking lot, dragged her into his car, fired a shot from a gun to scare off bystanders, and later threatened to shoot his girlfriend in the face if she reported the assault.

Reasonably enough, a Texas court found the drug dealer was a credible threat to the woman and placed him under a restraining order that included prohibiting him from having a gun while the order was in effect. He was later involved in multiple shootings, thus violating the gun prohibition — and triggering the current case attempting to restore his Second Amendment rights.

All indications from the court's actions on guns in recent years indicate he will win.

Domestic abuse, like so many modern issues, doesn't fit neatly into constitutional constructs created before the invention of indoor plumbing. It's true that an order of protection isn't a criminal conviction, but the standard for removing a firearm from someone who has demonstrated a clear danger to his partner (or children) should be lower than the standard for criminal conviction.

The court should take off its originalist blinkers and recognize that fact. And in case it doesn't, Missouri should finally close the domestic-abuse loophole in its state gun laws.

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