On July 25, Tarrant County District Court received a letter from Zackey Rahimi. He wanted to apologize.

The man at the center of a monumental Supreme Court case on gun rights allegedly shot guns in public at least six times over a three-month period: three times directly at people, once into a house and twice into the air. All of those alleged shootings occurred while he was under a protective order for domestic violence that prohibited him from possessing firearms.

In the letter, Rahimi pleaded with the judge to take mercy on him. Since his family immigrated to the United States from Afghanistan, he had grown up in poverty, he wrote. Shy and overweight, kids at school bullied him. A devoted gearhead, he found a way to help his family pay the bills in high school by flipping cars bought at auction after repairing and detailing them.

At some point, however, he drifted toward the wrong crowd that was using me & trying to get me to go on a wrong path.

I started being intoxicated at all times by smoking marijuana, drinking alcohol, doing pills & all type of mess trying to get me to become a whole other person, Rahimi wrote.

Now, he wanted to put the drugs behind him and focus on trying to earn an engineering certificate from a technical school, in the hope of landing a job in the automobile industry to help support his parents and his young son. He promised the judge he would stay away from firearms & weapons, & never to be away from my family again.