The U.S. Supreme Court will be ruling soon on whether police are allowed to enter a man's home uninvited, without a warrant, and take his guns.
That will be after they heard the Biden administration argue that such a scenario is reasonable.
The court heard arguments Wednesday in a case involving a Rhode Island couple. They argued, and the dispute spiraled out of control when the husband, Edward Daniglia, gave his wife, Kim, an unloaded gun and told her to put him out of his misery.
She left the house, but then later called police to check on him.
The Washington Examiner said the case "comes amid increasing friction between police and many of the communities they are tasked with protecting."
It also comes at a time when several prominent Democrats have openly advocated, sometimes in jest, sometimes not, for sending police around to Americans' homes to confiscate weapons that they consider unacceptable.
When police arrived, they found Caniglia fine, but hauled him to a hospital for a mental health evaluation anyway. They then searched his home and took his guns.
He alleged that violated his Fourth Amendment rights, but lost at the district and appellate court levels.
The Examiner reported several justices focused on the legal provision police have for "community care." Typically that gives them the ability to search in vehicles and such for anything that could be a danger to a community. It hasn't in the past commonly been applied to homes.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh cited the need for officers to be able to check on seniors, who might fall.
The Biden administration had told the justices to agree with police, because, "The ultimate question in this case is therefore not whether the respondent officers' actions fit within some narrow warrant exception, but instead whether those actions were reasonable."
The Rutherford Institute reported earlier the case set a dangerous precedent – because of the facts: that police entered a citizen's home without a warrant and took legal firearms.
It filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the case, asserting that the "community caretaking" exemption in the Fourth Amendment was wrongly used.
""This case represents a blatant attempt by law enforcement to create gaping holes in the Fourth Amendment force field that is supposed to protect homeowners and their homes against warrantless invasions by the government," said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute.
"What we do not need is yet another slippery slope argument that allows government officials to masquerade as community caretakers under the pretext of public health and safety in order to violate the Fourth Amendment at will."
If the precedent stands, the institute argued in its brief to the Supreme Court, police would be allowed to "enter a home without a warrant and seize lawfully possessed firearms."
The institute explained: "The warrantless searches and seizures to which American colonists had been subjected under English rule were among the driving forces behind enactment of the Bill of Rights in general and the Fourth Amendment in particular. Both as drafted and as applied by the court, the Fourth Amendment clearly creates a reasonable expectation of privacy in the home. The sacrosanct nature of the home is such that the circumstances under which warrantless home searches are permitted are few and far between.
"That explains why one of the few exceptions to the warrant requirement that the court has previously recognized – the so-called 'community caretaking exception – is expressly limited in scope to vehicles, where the reasonable expectation of privacy is much narrower."
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