POLITICSFederal Appeals Court Says Constitution Doesn’t Support Taking Guns Away From All Marijuana Users Categorically

A federal appeals court panel has dismissed a three-year prison sentence against a person convicted for possession of a firearm while being an active user of marijuana, ruling that the federal government’s prohibition on gun ownership by drug users is justified only in certain circumstances—not always.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit said in its opinion issued on Wednesday that while not all disarmament of drug users violates the Second Amendment, it nevertheless sometimes can.

“Nothing in our tradition allows disarmament simply because [the defendant] belongs to a category of people, drug users, that Congress has categorically deemed dangerous,” the ruling says.

Judges returned the matter to a lower court to determine whether the law as applied in the current case is constitutional, noting that further fact-finding is likely necessary and that “the district court is in the best position to take the first crack at it.”

The case arose after police found a Glock pistol in the car of the defendant, who acknowledged at trial that he smoked marijuana three to four times per week, including two days before the traffic stop. The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Iowa found him guilty and subsequently sentenced him to 37 months behind bars.

In weighing whether the government’s actions were constitutional, judges looked for historical analogues to the prohibition on gun ownership by drug users. While government lawyers argued that the ban is justified because of past laws against gun ownership by people with mental illness, the appellate panel noted that those laws typically required that a person be deemed both mentally ill and dangerous—and even then, prohibitions were considered on a case-by-case basis.

Neither confinement of the mentally ill nor the going-armed laws operated on an irrebuttable basis,” the opinion says. “In fact, each had an individualized assessment built in.”

“Sometimes disarming drug users and addicts will line up with the case-by-case historical tradition, but other times it will not,” it continues. “The district court’s task on remand is to figure out which side of the Second Amendment line [the defendant’s] case falls on.”

Judges used two hypotheticals to illustrate when the gun ban is sufficiently similar to past firearm restrictions to be deemed constitutional: a violent PCP user and a frail grandmother who uses medical marijuana and owns a shotgun for home defense.

For disarmament of drug users and addicts to be comparably ‘justifi[ed],’ it must be limited to those who ‘pose a danger to others,'” the panel wrote, quoting prior court decisions. “The analogy is complete, in other words, for someone whose ‘regular use[] of … PCP … induce[s] violence,’ but not for a ‘frail and elderly grandmother’ who ‘uses marijuana for a chronic medical condition.'”

“The lesson to draw is that this analogy only works ‘for some drug users,'” it added. “When ‘a court has found that the defendant ‘represents a credible threat,” a ban on firearm possession ‘fits neatly within the tradition.'”

In closing, the court said it would “tie up a loose end to save everyone time on remand,” noting that the government itself suggested that the defendant possessed the firearm for personal protection and that “‘individual self-defense is ‘the central component‘ of the Second Amendment right,’ not an exception to it.”

In recent years, the federal criminal statue known as 922(g)(3)—which prevents anyone who is an “unlawful user” of an illegal drug from buying or possessing firearms—has come under fire in a number of federal courts.

Earlier this year, a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled that the firearms ban was unconstitutional as applied to least one defendant, Patrick Daniels. That ruling came on the heels of a string of other judicial decisions casting doubt on the legality of the ban.

The situation has caused confusion among medical marijuana patients, state lawmakers and advocacy groups, among others. The National Rifle Association’s (NRA) lobbying arm said recently that the court rulings on the cannabis and guns issue have “led to a confusing regulatory landscape” that have impacted Americans’ Second Amendment rights.

Marijuana use is no longer limited to the domain of indigenous religious customs or youth-oriented counterculture and now includes a wide variety of people who use it for medicinal or recreational reasons,” said the advocacy group, which does not have an official stance on cannabis policy generally. “Many of these individuals are otherwise law-abiding and productive members of their communities and want to exercise their right to keep and bear arms.”

Separately, a federal judge in El Paso recently ruled that the government’s ongoing ban on gun ownership by habitual marijuana users is unconstitutional in the case of a defendant who earlier pleaded guilty to the criminal charge. The court allowed the man to withdraw the plea and ordered that the indictment against him be dismissed.

Another panel of judges, on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, heard oral arguments in November in the government’s appeal of a district court ruling that deemed the gun ban unconstitutional.