Trump Administration’s Pro-Gun Rights Agenda Stops When It Comes to Marijuana Use

The Trump administration’s aggressive defense of gun rights has at least one exception.

The government’s lawyers want the Supreme Court to make clear that regular pot smokers – and other drug users − shouldn’t be allowed to own firearms.

An appeals court has said a federal law making it a crime for drug users to have a gun can’t be used against someone based solely on their past drug use.

Limiting the law to blocking the use of guns while a person is high effectively guts the statute that reduces gun violence, the Justice Department told the Supreme Court. They’re asking the justices to overturn the appeals court’s decision. 

The department’s defense of the law is particularly notable as the Trump administration has sided with gun rights advocates in other cases – including one in which they declined to appeal a lower court’s ruling against a federal law setting 21 as the minimum age to own a handgun.

But on the issue of drug use, the government is appealing four cases to the Supreme Court, asking the justices to focus on one involving a dual citizen of the United States and Pakistan who was charged with unlawfully owning a Glock pistol because he regularly smoked marijuana.

— Maureen Groppe in Guns or weed? Trump administration says you can’t use both