BREAKING: SCOTUS Rules Gun Owners Can’t Be Prosecuted for Regular Marijuana Use

It’s hard to overstate how significant the fact is that today’s ruling in US v. Hemani was unanimous. Sure, the Court’s most politically compromised (and possibly intellectually challenged) Justices took the opportunity to call for overturning Bruen and going back to the bad old days of “tiered scrutiny.”

Aside from that hysteria, though, today’s narrow ruling, written by Justice Neil Gorsuch, has decisively established that the government’s justification for designating marijuana users and violent and dangerous just because they say so, would establish a very slippery slope that could eventually eviscerate Americans’ gun rights.

Gorsuch wrote that the government . . .

…asks us to conclude that anyone who regularly uses marijuana is categorically violent and dangerous without any further showing. All based on little more than its current say-so, one at odds with its own regulatory actions. And affording the government that kind of ‘broad power to designate any group as dangerous and thereby disqualify its members from having a gun’ would risk allowing it to ‘quickly swallow’ the Second Amendment.

The Court obviously decided the government’s blanket ban on all marijuana use is far too broad.

The government considers Mr. Hemani an unlawful user of a controlled substance because he admits to using marijuana about every other day. But how much marijuana does Mr. Hemani use, in what potency, and to what effect? Is he routinely unable to manage his affairs, a risk to himself or his family? Or does he use a mild gummy as a sleep aid a few times a week? We do not know and, the government says, it doesn’t matter. The government asks us to analogize him to a habitual drunkard all the same.

To be clear, the narrow ruling doesn’t overturn the ban on all drug users or those under the influence from having guns. Again, from Gorsuch . . .

The Court’s decision is narrow. It does not address efforts to ban addicts or those presently intoxicated from possessing a firearm; other prophylactic laws Congress might adopt after determining that users of a particular drug pose a special risk of misusing firearms; §922(g)(1)’s provision disarming individuals convicted of felonies; or whether the government could bring a prosecution under §922(g)(3) accompanied by individualized proof that the defendant’s drug use renders him a danger to himself or others, or proof that a certain drug always renders its users dangerous.

Hemani wasn’t prosecuted for having or using “harder” drugs or distributing. He was in possession of a firearm in his home and told arresting officers that he used marijuana about “every other day.” That, along with the government’s less-than-persuasive arguments, failed to convince even once Justice that he was somehow too violent or dangerous to retain his Second Amendment rights.

In short, possessing marijuana and being a regular user is no longer sufficient justification for losing your gun rights. By this ruling, in order to prosecute a marijuana user for gun possession, the government will have to show that a person is under the influence, addicted, or presents a danger to himself or others. Remember also that the question on the 4473 form is still there. For now.

Read the full opinion here.