In United States v. Hemani, the U.S. Supreme Court yesterday held that the federal government could not prosecute Ali Hemani under 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(3)'s "unlawful user" provision solely because he used marijuana a few times a week while owning a firearm at home. Ilya Somin and Stephen Halbrook wrote about the decision yesterday. In this post, coauthored with Wyoming law professor George Mocsary, I'd like to provide some additional perspective.
The Hemani decision is personally important to the many millions of Americans who use marijuana and who also possess firearms, while being careful never to mix the two. The Court has removed from these peaceable and responsible citizens the threat of a 15-year sentence in federal prison.
The decision is also important to the growing jurisprudential doctrine of the Second Amendment. Under the Court's precedents in Bruen and Rahimi, new types of gun control laws can be justified by analogy to older, historic laws. Hemani teaches that courts should be rigorous when the government attempts to make far-fetched analogies to disarm huge categories of Americans who are not dangerous. We argued in an amicus brief in the case, along with NRA's Joe Greenlee (the brief's lead author) and Professor F. Lee Francis of Widener Law School, that someone who uses marijuana is not comparable to a nineteenth century "vagrant" who might be sent to a workhouse, nor to a "habitual drunkard" who had to be institutionalized after losing his mental capacity. The Court agreed.
