Supreme Court ties the Constitution in knots to avoid taking guns away from drug users 

To anyone who has been following the Supreme Court’s embrace of gun rights, its unanimous June 18 decision invalidating a federal law designed to keep guns out of the hands of drug users would not have come as a surprise. As it has often done, the court bent over backward to treat the Second Amendment as the crucial bulwark of American liberty. 

But to do so, it had to embrace a position on drugs that is not often paired with gun rights. Its decision in U.S. v. Hemani brought marijuana use into the constitutional mainstream and offered a picture of American life replete with drug use and alcohol consumption.

Its decision also offered another glimpse into the morass created by the high court’s originalist approach to the Second Amendment — and the limits of that enterprise. 

Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor, while agreeing that the decision in Hemani correctly applied existing Supreme Court precedent, were right to call on their colleagues to return interpretation of the Second Amendment to the mainstream of modern constitutional readings. The statute in question made it a crime to “knowingly possess” a gun while being “an ‘unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance.'” Ali Hemani ran afoul of that law in an incidental way.

A dual citizen of Pakistan and the U.S., he was suspected of involvement in terrorist activities. The government obtained a warrant to search his home and those of family members. During their search, as the court notes, Hemani “surrendered a gun” and revealed that he used marijuana “‘about every other day.'”

The government prosecuted........

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