The Supreme Court ruled unanimously Thursday that the federal government cannot strip a marijuana user of his Second Amendment rights simply because he uses an illegal drug, a decision that dismantles a key provision of the same 1968 law once used to convict Hunter Biden on federal gun charges.
Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion in United States v. Hemani, holding that the prosecution of Ali Danial Hemani, a Texas man who kept a handgun in his home for self-defense while admitting to smoking marijuana about every other day, violated the Second Amendment. The ruling struck down 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(3) as applied to Hemani, the federal statute that makes it a felony for any "unlawful user" of a controlled substance to possess a firearm.
All nine justices agreed on the outcome. But the opinion's implications reach well beyond one Texas man's handgun. The same statute was used to convict Hunter Biden for buying a gun while addicted to cocaine in 2018, a conviction that became moot only after President Joe Biden issued his son a sweeping pardon.
Hemani's legal trouble started when FBI agents raided his home in Texas and found a handgun. During the encounter, Hemani admitted he smoked marijuana roughly every other day. That admission alone was enough for federal prosecutors to charge him with a felony under § 922(g)(3).
Prosecutors never alleged Hemani was addicted. They never claimed he had used a firearm while intoxicated, threatened anyone, or posed a danger to himself or others. The government's entire case rested on his status as a regular marijuana user who happened to own a gun.
Gorsuch found that argument fatally flawed. The government had tried to justify the modern statute by pointing to historical laws that restricted firearm access for "habitual drunkards." But the Court concluded those analogues fell apart under scrutiny.
As Fox News Digital reported, Gorsuch wrote in the majority opinion:
"The government's analogy fails under every measure it asks us to consider. The historical laws on which it relies targeted different kinds of people, did so for different reasons, and operated in different ways."
The historical "habitual drunkard" laws, Gorsuch explained, applied to individuals so severely impaired they had lost the regular use of their reason. Hemani, a man who smoked marijuana a few times a week, bore no resemblance to that category.
The opinion went further than simply rejecting the government's historical analogies. Gorsuch warned that the government's reading of § 922(g)(3) was so broad it could sweep in millions of ordinary Americans who have never posed a threat to anyone.
Under the government's interpretation, Gorsuch noted, the law could potentially reach "a college student who routinely uses a friend's Adderall to cram for exams" or "a husband who regularly takes his wife's prescription Ambien to sleep." The statute draws no distinctions based on the substance, the amount, or whether the user has ever been dangerous.
Justice Gorsuch drove the point home with a broader constitutional warning:
"Affording the government 'broad power to designate any group as dangerous and thereby disqualify its members from having a gun' would risk allowing it to 'quickly swallow' the Second Amendment."
That language matters. It signals the Court's unwillingness to let Congress or the executive branch define entire classes of citizens out of their constitutional rights based on categorical assumptions rather than individual conduct.
Perhaps the sharpest passage in Gorsuch's opinion targeted the federal government's own inconsistency on marijuana policy. The Court noted that most states now permit some form of marijuana use, and that the federal government itself has reduced marijuana enforcement while pursuing efforts to move the drug to a less restrictive schedule.
Gorsuch put it bluntly, as Breitbart reported:
"Whatever one thinks of these developments, the federal government has not just tolerated them; it helped fuel them. All of which leaves it awkwardly positioned to suggest that the millions of Americans who now regularly use marijuana are categorically and unusually dangerous."
That observation lays bare a contradiction that has festered in federal drug policy for years. Washington has spent the better part of a decade signaling that marijuana is not particularly dangerous, relaxing enforcement, encouraging rescheduling, looking the other way as state after state legalized sales, while simultaneously maintaining a statute that treats every marijuana user as too dangerous to own a firearm.
The Court, in effect, told the government it cannot have it both ways.
While the outcome was unanimous, the reasoning was not monolithic. National Review reported that the majority opinion commanded seven votes, with Justices Samuel Alito and Elena Kagan concurring only in the judgment, agreeing Hemani should win but declining to join the full majority reasoning.
Alito wrote separately to emphasize the factual mismatch at the heart of the case:
"The mismatch between the Government's historical analogues and the theory on which the Government defends the constitutionality of §922(g)(3) as applied to respondent is clear."
The ruling was explicitly narrow in one important respect. Gorsuch stressed that the Court was not opening the door for addicts or intoxicated individuals to carry firearms. "We do not address efforts to ban addicts, or those presently intoxicated, from possessing a firearm," he wrote. The government retains the ability to prosecute individuals who possess firearms while actively impaired or who can be shown to pose a genuine danger.
That distinction matters for the inevitable political reaction. Gun-control advocates will frame this as a reckless expansion of firearm access. But the opinion draws a clear line between occasional drug use and the kind of impairment or addiction that historically justified restrictions.
The case gained national attention in part because of its obvious implications for Hunter Biden's legal history. The younger Biden was convicted under the same § 922(g)(3) for purchasing a firearm while addicted to cocaine. That conviction became a flashpoint in the broader debate over whether the Biden family received preferential treatment from the Justice Department.
Hunter Biden's conviction was ultimately rendered moot by his father's pardon, a sweeping grant of clemency that Just The News noted came before the Supreme Court could weigh in on the constitutional question the case raised. The pardon spared Hunter Biden the legal consequences of a guilty verdict, but it also denied the public a definitive judicial answer on whether the law itself was constitutional as applied to him.
Now the Court has provided that answer, at least in the narrower context of a recreational marijuana user. Whether the ruling would have changed the outcome in Hunter Biden's case, which involved addiction to a harder drug, remains an open question the Court pointedly declined to resolve.
The broader pattern surrounding the Biden family's legal entanglements, from Senate Republicans' release of DOJ records to the pardon itself, has left many Americans skeptical that the system operates the same way for the well-connected as it does for everyone else. Ali Hemani, a Texas man with no famous last name, had to take his case all the way to the Supreme Court to vindicate his rights. Hunter Biden simply received a pardon.
Conservative legal organizations welcomed the decision. Carrie Severino, president of the Judicial Crisis Network, called it "a good day for the Second Amendment when all nine justices can agree to protect gun rights." She noted the historical context that the majority relied on:
"Historically, 'habitual drunkards' who habitually lost use of their reason could have their rights restricted, but not just regular drinkers, even including Founding Fathers like John Adams, who drank 'a tankard of hard cider' with breakfast, or James Madison, who 'consumed a pint of whisky daily.'"
Tyler Yzaguirre, president of the Second Amendment Institute, emphasized the broader principle at stake. "This ruling reinforces the principle that firearm restrictions must be consistent with our nation's historical tradition of gun regulation, not modern political preferences," he said.
Amy Swearer, senior legal fellow at Advancing American Freedom, pushed back preemptively against the predictable outcry from gun-control groups:
"Gun control activists will inevitably claim that the sky is falling. It isn't. The ruling still leaves the government room to disarm addicts or prosecute people who possess firearms while actively intoxicated."
That framing is worth taking seriously. The decision does not create a blanket right for drug users to carry firearms. It holds that the government must do more than point to someone's recreational drug use and declare them categorically unfit to exercise a constitutional right. It must show something more, addiction, intoxication, dangerousness, before it can strip that right away.
The Court's careful narrowing leaves significant questions for future litigation. The opinion does not address whether § 922(g)(3) is constitutional as applied to addicts, to users of harder drugs, or to individuals who possess firearms while actively under the influence. It does not disturb the separate federal prohibitions on gun possession by convicted felons. And it does not resolve how lower courts should handle the many pending cases involving drug users and firearms.
The ruling also sidesteps the question of whether Hunter Biden's specific circumstances, involving cocaine addiction rather than recreational marijuana use, would have survived constitutional scrutiny. Gorsuch's explicit carve-out for addicts suggests the government might still have a path to prosecute in cases involving genuine addiction. But that question will have to wait for another case and another day.
What Thursday's ruling establishes is a principle that should be obvious but apparently required Supreme Court intervention to affirm: the government cannot criminalize the exercise of a constitutional right based on nothing more than a person's membership in a broad, vaguely defined category of Americans whom the government has decided, without individual evidence, might be dangerous.
When Washington itself has spent years telling the country that marijuana is no big deal, it takes a special kind of bureaucratic audacity to then prosecute a man for owning a handgun because he smokes it.
