Rethinking the Official Use Exemption: Firearms, Protective Orders, and the Police

This guest post is based on a paper that was presented at the 2025 Firearms Law Works-In-Progress Conference and reflects the author’s views only. The Conference is held each year on a home-and-away basis with the University of Wyoming Firearms Research Center. This post also appears on the FRC's Forum. 

In 2019, ProPublica reported that every member of the police force in Stebbins, Alaska had been convicted of domestic violence. While this small fishing village is admittedly not representative of the United States as a whole, it starkly illustrates a troubling and persistent reality in law enforcement. Over thirty years of research has led experts to conclude that police officers commit intimate partner abuse at rates greater than the general population. In fact, some estimates suggest that domestic violence may be two to four times more prevalent in law enforcement families.

Several factors contribute to the prevalence of officer-involved domestic violence (OIDV):

● The spillover of power and control. Traits considered essential on the job, such as authoritarianism and dominance, can bleed into officers’ personal lives. When the boundary between professional and private spheres blurs, perceived “noncompliance from a spouse … may … appear as a challenge or threat requiring a forceful response.”

●  Exposure to violence. The violent nature of police work can cause officers to become desensitized to it. When violence becomes routine or unexceptional, violence against an intimate partner becomes normalized and, in the perpetrator’s view, justifiable.

●  Untreated psychological trauma. Unmanaged burnout or post-traumatic stress disorder in officers can manifest in violence. Researchers have found that approximately 80 percent of male police officers who scored high on burnout scales reported “losing control and behaving violently towards citizens, fellow officers, [their] spouse or mate, or children.”

Whatever the cause, one thing is clear: police officers who abuse are among the most dangerous perpetrators. Their combat training, access to surveillance technologies and confidential data, and intimate knowledge of the legal system can place survivors at great risk. Officers know how to subdue without leaving visible injuries, can access otherwise private shelters and records, and benefit from relationships with prosecutors and judges who will often collude to shield them from accountability. A culture of extending “professional courtesy”—where misconduct by fellow officers is overlooked, unreported, and unpunished—further emboldens abusers and endangers both survivors and the public.

The greatest danger to survivors, however, is officers’ access to firearms, which can readily turn domestic violence into domestic homicide. Recognizing the deadly combination of guns and intimate partner abuse, federal law bars perpetrators of domestic violence from possessing firearms. But while all domestic violence misdemeanants are prohibited possessors, the statute that bars individuals subject to domestic violence protective orders from possessing firearms suffers from a significant flaw: those who can demonstrate they need a firearm for an “official use” are permitted to retain access. This means that police officers under family violence protective orders can retain their guns, even personal ones, while on duty, despite the risks they pose. 

The nature of an officer’s service, the ephemeral line between on-duty and off-duty, can lead to virtually unfettered firearm access. Officers may be on duty, or at least on call, 24/7. They also regularly work repeated, consecutive, long-hour shifts, effectively granting them continuous access to guns. Further blurring the lines are departmental policies that require or authorize firearm possession while off-duty, as well as officers moonlighting in private security roles that are similar to their public police functions.

Given the high rates of family violence within law enforcement communities and the grave danger armed officers pose to intimate partners, the status quo is untenable. Allowing police officers who perpetrate domestic abuse to maintain access to firearms, especially unrestricted access, poses too grave a risk to survivors. 

Last year, the Supreme Court upheld, in United States v. Rahimi, the constitutionality of the federal law  disarming individuals under domestic violence protective orders. It is “common sense” the Chief Justice wrote, that “[w]hen an individual poses a clear threat of physical violence to another, the threatening individual may be disarmed.” Yet this principle falters when police officers, the very individuals tasked with upholding the law, are not held to it. Eliminating the “official use” exemption would be a vital step toward aligning policy with the Court’s common-sense ideal. Disarming officers who have demonstrated a capacity for intimate partner violence is not only consistent with public safety—it is essential to it.