One of the knocks on the Supreme Court has been its reticence to take Second Amendment-related cases. That doesn’t seem to be the case any more. SCOTUS has already granted cert in Wolford v. Lopez. That’s the case challenging the “vampire rule” aspect of Hawaii’s Bruen response law banning concealed carry on private property unless owners post signs explicitly allowing it.
Now the Court has decided to weigh in on another long-standing gun control that’s highly contentious, even among gun rights supporters…namely the ban on gun ownership by illegal drug users.
This is contentious because the drug most often used by millions of Americans is marijuana. While it remains a Class I controlled substance at the federal level, weed has been legalized by at least 24 states and decriminalized in more.
Today, the Supreme Court granted cert in US v. Hemani which challenges the gun ownership ban for drug users. This is a Texas case in which an FBI raid turned up a 9mm pistol along with quantities of both marijuana and cocaine in the home of Daniel Hemani. A US District Court judge ruled for Hemani relying on a Fifth Circuit decision that ruled the individual wasn’t presently using drugs. The federal government then moved for SCOTUS to get involved.
As SCOTUSblog describes the case . . .
Hemani asked the district court to dismiss the [illegal possession] charge, arguing that applying the law to him violated the Constitution.
U.S. District Judge Amos Mazzant granted Hemani’s request, with the government’s agreement. He relied on a 2023 decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit invalidating a conviction under the same law when “the jury did not necessarily find that” the defendant in that case “was presently or even recently engaged in unlawful drug use.” The 5th Circuit upheld Mazzant’s decision.
The government came to the Supreme Court in June, asking the justices to take up the case. U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer acknowledged that “[t]he Second Amendment’s right to keep and bear arms is a fundamental right that is essential to ordered liberty,” and that “[u]njustifiable restrictions on that right present a grave threat to Americans’ most cherished freedoms.”
But, Sauer continued, the federal law at the center of the case is one of the “narrow circumstances in which the government may justifiably burden that right.” First, he contended, because the law bars only habitual drug users from having a gun, it “imposes a limited, inherently temporary restriction—one which the individual can remove at any time simply by ceasing his unlawful drug use.” Second, he wrote, the law “stands solidly within our Nation’s history and tradition of regulation” of firearms, a key inquiry in determining whether gun restrictions are constitutional. Sauer characterized the law as “a modest, modern analogue” of early American restrictions on the possession of guns by “habitual drunkards.” Third, he added, “habitual illegal drug users with firearms present unique dangers to society—especially because they pose a grave risk of armed, hostile encounters with police officers while impaired.”
Stay tuned. This one will be interesting to watch.
— Dan Zimmerman, Shooting News Weekly
