The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 9-0 in United States v. Hemani.
The Court decided that the federal statute that prohibits the possession or ownership of firearms by a person who “is an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance” violates the Second Amendment when applied to regular marijuana users.
This ruling could impact individuals who wants to purchase a firearm from a federal firearms licensee. To do so, a person must fill out form 4473 from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) and undergo a background check. One of the questions on this ATF form asks: “Are you an unlawful user of, or addicted to, marijuana or any depressant, stimulant, narcotic drug, or any other controlled substance?”
That question will need to be changed.
Indeed, this legality made a lot of news during the Biden administration as former President Joe Biden’s (D) son Hunter was charged with lying on Form 4473—a crime, among possible others, that President Biden pardoned his son for.
In this particular U.S. Supreme Court case, the government charged Ali Danial Hemani with one count of violating the statute in February 2023. Hemani was investigated for an unrelated crime, and when FBI agents searched his home, they found a pistol and marijuana.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit subsequently found the federal law unconstitutional in most cases and ruled that it could only be applied to those who are “presently impaired.”
The U.S. Department of Justice appealed, arguing that the law should be upheld because habitual drug users with firearms present “unique dangers to society.”
This issue is complex partly because, while marijuana remains a controlled substance at the federal level, it has also been legalized in nearly half the states. Further, the Trump administration has made recent moves to shift how marijuana is classified by the federal government.
When asking the Supreme Court to hear this case, U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer said 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 claimed, the federal law at the center of the case is one of the “narrow circumstances in which the government may justifiably burden that right.”
Sauer maintained that the law “imposes a limited, inherently temporary restriction—one which the individual can remove at any time simply by ceasing his unlawful drug use.” Also, he wrote that the law “stands solidly within our Nation’s history and tradition of regulation” as there were Founding-era restrictions on the possession of guns by “habitual drunkards.”
The U.S. Supreme Court just unanimously rejected these last claims.
“Affording the government ‘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,” ruled the Court in Hemani.
Commenting on the decision, NRA-ILA Executive Director John Commerford stated, “Today’s unanimous decision in United States v. Hemani is a major victory for the Second Amendment and peaceable gun owners across the United States. The court correctly rejected the government’s attempt to disarm millions of responsible citizens—without any pre-deprivation process—based solely on their status as occasional marijuana users. As the NRA emphasized in our amicus brief, no one should be deprived of their God-given right to keep and bear arms for engaging in nonviolent conduct, and there is no historical justification for doing so.”
