The Court is weighing if drug users fall under the same category as drunkards, or not.
By Catholics for Catholics
The Supreme Court seemed prepared Monday to lessen a law forbidding drug addicts from buying firearms, which was used to convict Hunter Biden, after a majority of justices expressed skepticism about its nebulousness.
In addition, on Monday the Supreme Court entered the juncture of drug use and gun ownership, trying to determine what level of marijuana use turns someone so precarious that they lose their right to possess a firearm, according to a story by The Washington Times.
Still, the judges seemed sensitive to the difficulty of the casual marijuana user but concerned about issuing a ruling that paves the way for firearm ownership by users of powerful hallucinogens, of heroin and methamphetamine.
According to The Times, some of the justices used the case to attack the more encompassing state of gun jurisprudence, saying the high court’s 2022 Bruen decision, which said only gun restrictions that would have been countenanced by the nation’s founding era can survive constitutional scrutiny.
Because there were no drug laws to speak of at the founding, the Department of Justice contended that laws permitting gun restrictions on public drunkards were a good enough comparison to justify modern bans on drug users.
“When you habitually used intoxicating substances, you can present special dangers,” Deputy Solicitor General Sarah Harris told the court.
However, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said the founders only used those prohibitions to people who were “falling down drunk in the streets.”
“That’s what it means to be a habitual user back then,” said Justice Jackson, a Biden appointee. “That’s not what we have here.”
The prohibition on drug users owning firearms is part of a longer list of so-called “prohibited persons” in the Gun Control Act. The list also includes felons, fugitives, those adjudicated as a “mental defective,” illegal immigrants and those who have been convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence or are the subject of a court-issued protection order.
The justices in 2024 upheld that latter prohibition, though said it requires an individualized determination of someone’s danger.
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