The Supreme Court Has Good News for Stoners With Guns

The latest Second Amendment case is just the latest to highlight the chaos wrought by the high court’s new “history and tradition” test.

The Supreme Court narrowed a federal law that made it a criminal offense for illegal drug users to own firearms, ruling on Thursday that the conviction of a Texas man under that measure was “inconsistent with the Second Amendment.” While the ruling was a rare moment of unanimity, the various judges displayed some interesting fissures between them—and highlighted how thorny Second Amendment cases have become since the court imposed a new test for gun-rights cases.

Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for himself and six other justices, said that federal prosecutors had not found a sufficient historical analogue under the court’s “history-and-tradition” test to support the prosecution. “Without more, the government asks us to analogize all such persons to habitual drunkards,” he wrote in United States v. Hemani. “To state the analogy is to expose its deficiency.”

Thursday’s ruling is another milestone in the federal courts’ four-year quest to reconcile America’s numerous gun restrictions with the Supreme Court’s new history-and-tradition test. While it marks the first time since adopting the test that the court has used it to invalidate a federal law, it also underscores how much the high court has curtailed the test’s original ambitions.

The case began when federal agents searched the family home of Ali Hemani in 2022. The U.S. government suspected that Hemani, a Texas-born American who also has Pakistani citizenship, had ties to terrorist organizations. During the search, Hemani surrendered a firearm that he otherwise lawfully owned and told them that he regularly smoked marijuana, some of which he had in his possession. He also took ownership of a bag of cocaine that the agents found in his parents’ closet.

Thanks in part to Hemani’s forthrightness, federal prosecutors charged him with violating Section 922(g)(3), which make it a federal offense to knowingly possess a gun in one’s home while being an “unlawful user” of a controlled substance. “The charge had nothing to do with terrorism—the reason for the search in the first place,” Gorsuch noted. “Nor did the charge involve possession of cocaine, drug trafficking, or anything like that.” Indeed, one gets the distinct impression that prosecutors were trying to prove that they weren’t wasting everyone’s time.

Before trial, Hemani sought to dismiss the indictment by arguing that it violated the Second Amendment. The Supreme Court held........

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