A unanimous Supreme Court ruled the government can’t strip your gun rights just because you smoke weed, and Justice Neil Gorsuch used the government’s own rescheduling to twist the knife.
Here is the short version. You can smoke weed every other day and still legally own a gun. The Supreme Court said so on June 18, and not one justice broke ranks.
The 9-0 ruling in U.S. v. Hemani sided with Ali Danial Hemani, a Texas man who told federal agents he smoked about every other day. Agents found a Glock 9mm and 60 grams of weed in his house in 2022, and the government charged him under 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(3), the federal law that bars “unlawful” drug users from owning a firearm. No other crime was charged. No gun waved around while high. Nobody hurt. The entire case was that he smoked, so he was dangerous, so the government could take his gun for life and put him in prison for up to 15 years.
Nine justices looked at that and said no.
The government “asks us to conclude that anyone who regularly uses marijuana is categorically violent and dangerous without any further showing,” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for the majority. “All based on little more than its current say-so, one at odds with its own regulatory actions.”
That last clause is the knife. “Its own regulatory actions” means the rescheduling. This is the same federal government that moved state-licensed and FDA-approved medical marijuana to Schedule III earlier this year, under an April order from Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. Gorsuch pointed out that Washington “has not just tolerated” the rise of state-legal weed, “it helped fuel” it. So the government strolled into court having already gone soft on cannabis itself, then turned around and argued the people who …
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Author: Javier Hasse / High Times
