The U.S. Supreme Court has unanimously sided with a man who was prosecuted for possessing a gun while being a regular consumer of marijuana, ruling that the government’s actions violate the Second Amendment.
The opinion authored by Justice Neil Gorsuch is narrow in scope and does not entirely strike down the federal law known as 922(g)(3) that prohibits people who illegally consume controlled substances from possessing or purchasing firearms.
But it does say that as applied to the man in the current case, Ali Danial Hemani, it is unconstitutional to automatically bar people from lawful gun ownership just because they happen to use marijuana occasionally.
It also says that the broad ban and the government’s effort to defend it are “at odds with” the Trump administration’s move to federally reschedule cannabis.
The government “asks us to conclude that anyone who regularly uses marijuana is categorically violent and dangerous without any further showing,” the opinion says. “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
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