The National Rifle Association's magazine America's 1st Freedom praised conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas for questioning whether the Second Amendment comports with laws that ban gun ownership for convicted domestic abusers.

Justice Thomas made headlines on February 29 by asking his first question from the bench in nearly 10 years during oral arguments for the case Voisine v. United States. The Voisine case is about statutory construction: whether convictions under certain state domestic violence laws trigger the federal prohibition on gun ownership for individuals convicted of a “misdemeanor crime of domestic violence.”

Although the case will be decided on statutory rather than Second Amendment grounds, toward the end of oral arguments Thomas raised a constitutional question of banning gun ownership for convicted domestic abusers, asking, “This is a misdemeanor violation. It suspends a constitutional right. Can you give me another area where a misdemeanor violation suspends a constitutional right?”

The NRA -- which claims it supports prohibitions on gun ownership by domestic abusers while often undermining attempts to actually take guns out of abusers' hands -- praised Justice Thomas, claiming he had “cornered the government's lawyer over and again.”

The NRA article added that Thomas' “tough questioning gives many hope that he might pick up where the late Justice Antonin Scalia left off, as the Court's most vocal, ardent and effective defender of your Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms,” and concluded with the suggestion that Justice Scalia “would have approved.”

Despite the NRA's enthusiasm for questioning the prohibition of gun ownership bans for convicted domestic abusers, Second Amendment challenges to domestic violence gun prohibition laws have been routinely rejected by courts throughout the United States in recent years.

According to the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence (LCPGV), the 2008 District of Columbia v. Heller decision “opened the floodgates to Second Amendment litigation.” The majority opinion in that case, which was authored by Justice Scalia, found that the Second Amendment protects the right to possess a handgun in the home for the purpose of self-defense.

Indeed, close to one thousand Second Amendment challenges have been filed since Heller, but the vast majority have been rejected. This is because the Heller decision also found that most gun regulations are presumptively lawful, explaining, “nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.”

In a 2015 analysis, LCPGV found that since Heller “criminal defendants now routinely claim that criminal statutes violate the Second Amendment,” but that “those claims have been met with nearly uniform rejection by the courts.” According to LCPGV, “Courts have nearly uniformly upheld laws banning the possession of firearms by felons and persons convicted of certain misdemeanors, such as crimes of domestic violence.”