With the U.S. Supreme Court scheduled to hear United States v. Hemani on March 2–a case that challenges the law barring firearm possession by anyone who “is an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance”—the NRA, along with the Independence Institute and FPC Action Foundation, filed an amicus brief.
The brief sums up its argument this way:
To justify firearms prohibition for marijuana users when they are not intoxicated, the government must prove that the ban is consistent with our nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation. That tradition supports restrictions on the use of firearms while intoxicated, but it does not support disarming individuals when they are sober merely because they sometimes use intoxicants.
Throughout American history, legislatures recognized that intoxication could temporarily increase the danger of firearms misuse. But they did not respond by entirely disarming people based on their status as users. Instead, historical intoxication laws regulated conduct: restricting the carrying, discharge, or purchase of firearms only while a person was intoxicated and only for as long as that condition lasted. The historical record thus reflects a consistent tradition of narrow, situational restrictions rather than categorical disarmament.
On the federal level, the prohibition applies to marijuana users regardless of whether marijuana is legal under state law or used for medicinal purposes. The Court agreed to hear the case after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit held the ban unconstitutional as applied to Hemani, a marijuana user.
According to the standard set in the Supreme Court’s Bruen (2022) decision, for a restriction on the right to arms to stand it must be grounded in America’s historical tradition of firearm regulation. In this constitutional republic, the intent of the people who passed a restriction on government matters, determined the Court.
“Historically, legislatures addressed the risks associated with firearms and intoxicants through narrow, conduct-based restrictions—temporarily limiting the carry, use, or purchase of firearms while a person was intoxicated—rather than categorically disarming individuals based on their status as users,” wrote NRA-ILA on this brief. “Laws that completely disarmed Americans were always based on dangerousness, yet in this case the government has made no serious effort to establish any connection between marijuana use and dangerousness.”
