The Supreme Court ruled today that the prosecution of a casual marijuana user for unlawful gun possession violates the Second Amendment.
The ruling extends Second Amendment rights to a casual marijuana user, but otherwise says little new about the Court’s historical-tradition approach to the Second Amendment.
The case, United States v. Hemani, arose out of the government’s prosecution of Ali Hemani for knowingly possessing a gun in his home while being an unlawful drug user, in violation of 18 U.S.C. Sec. 922(g)(3). During the investigation, Hemani pointed federal agents to marijuana in his home and told them that he used it about every other day.
The Court ruled that the prosecution violated the Second Amendment. It applied its historical-tradition approach under New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n, Inc. v. Bruen, and held that the government couldn’t point to a sufficiently similar historical analog to its prosecution of a person for casual marijuana use.
In particular, the Court rejected the government’s sweeping theory that the statute validly bans “an individual from possessing a gun from the moment he becomes an unlawful user of any controlled substance and remains in effect until he ceases being one,” regardless of the drug, or the amounts ingested, or the person’s dangerousness, or the reasons the person keeps a gun, or how safely the person keeps the gun. It said that the government’s analogy to historical “habitual drunkard” laws “fails on every metric.”
According to the Court, the ruling “is narrow.” It doesn’t “address efforts to ban addicts, or those presently intoxicated, from possessing a firearm” or “other prophylactic laws Congress might adopt after determining that users of a particular drug pose a special risk of misusing firearms.” It also doesn’t address federal law that “disarm[s] individuals convicted of felonies.” Finally, it doesn’t address cases where a particular person’s use of marijuana, or any other drug, renders the person dangerous.
Justice Thomas concurred, adding that Section 922(g)(3) “appears to exceed Congress’s enumerated power to regulate interstate commerce.”
Justice Jackson concurred, joined by Justice Sotomayor, expressing her view that the Court “veered off course in Bruen.”
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