"Treating all cannabis users—nearly one-fifth of the adult population—as presumptively dangerous criminals is incompatible with historical tradition, modern societal norms, and this Court's own framework for Second Amendment analysis."
— Liberty Justice Center brief, United States v. Hemani

If you've used marijuana in the last year and you own guns, federal law already considers you a prohibited person under 18 USC 922(g)(3). That's not a hypothetical — that's the statute as written, right now, today. The 4473 you filled out at your last purchase asks about it directly.

The historical analogy the government is leaning on — laws against carrying while intoxicated — doesn't survive five minutes of honest scrutiny. Those were about being drunk in public, not about stripping someone's rights because they used a substance at some point in the past while sitting in their own home. The law as currently applied doesn't require you to be impaired, dangerous, or even in possession of marijuana — just a "user."

The political inconsistency here is hard to ignore. The same administration asking the Court to uphold this blanket disqualification is also pursuing marijuana rescheduling and had its own candidate publicly back legalization at the state level. Whatever you think about cannabis policy, using it as a backdoor to felony gun charges for tens of millions of people while simultaneously softening on the underlying substance is a strange hill to defend.

What's your line on this one? If SCOTUS rules the blanket ban unconstitutional and the standard shifts to actual evidence of impairment or dangerousness — does that change how you think about who should be a prohibited person, or does federal drug scheduling still matter to you regardless of the Second Amendment angle?

Read the full article in The Handbook → | By Steve Duskett