The Supreme Court has agreed to review the law preventing drug users from possessing firearms
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court agreed Monday to decide whether a federal law barring frequent users of illegal drugs from possessing a firearm violates the Constitution’s right to bear arms.
The Trump administration, which has defended the law despite its blanket support for gun rights, has asked the justices to hear an appeal of an appeals court ruling in favor of Ali Daniel Himani, an alleged regular marijuana user accused of violating the law.
It is the same law under which Hunter Biden, the son of former President Joe Biden, was convicted in June 2024 before his father pardoned him.
This is the second gun rights case that the Supreme Court has taken up in recent weeks. On October 3, the justices agreed to review whether a Hawaii law imposing new restrictions on where people with concealed carry permits can carry handguns also violates the Second Amendment.
The court’s 6-3 conservative majority generally supports gun rights, but until the recent flurry of activism, it seemed reluctant to take up new cases on the issue.
The court expanded the right to bear arms in a key 2022 ruling that relied on a historical understanding of the Second Amendment, but appears to have backed down slightly two years later. In 2024, she supported a federal law prohibiting people subject to domestic violence restraining orders from possessing firearms.
Lower courts are grappling with how to interpret long-standing gun restrictions in light of the Supreme Court’s new history-based approach. One is the federal law at issue in this latest case.
Lower courts are now divided over whether restrictions on gun ownership for frequent drug users violate the Second Amendment. Himani’s case originated in Texas, where he successfully challenged his indictment in district court. The US Fifth Circuit Court, based in New Orleans, upheld that decision, applying a new precedent it had set a year earlier in a different case.
In that ruling, the appeals court concluded that the law could not be constitutionally enforced simply because the government alleges that someone regularly uses drugs. The appeals court ruled that the government must instead prove that the gun owner was under the influence of drugs at the time of the arrest.
Prosecutors made no such offer in the Hemani case.
Attorney General J. Dean Sawyer said in court papers that Himani, a joint citizen of the United States and Pakistan, was already on the FBI’s radar when he was arrested. The government confirmed that Himani and his family have relations with Iranian entities hostile to the United States.
A gun, marijuana, and cocaine were found when the FBI conducted a search of his home in 2022.
While the Second Amendment is a “fundamental right essential to ordered liberty,” Sawyer wrote, there are “narrow circumstances” in which it is acceptable for the government to restrict it.
He added that the restriction at issue in this case is “a modest and modern counterpart to the more stringent Founding-era restrictions imposed on habitual drunkards, and so it stands firmly in our nation’s history and tradition of regulation.”
Himani’s lawyers urged the court not to hear the case, saying the appeals court correctly interpreted the historical tradition of disarming intoxicated people.
The appeals court correctly concluded that “history and tradition have shown laws prohibiting the carrying of weapons while under the influence of alcohol, but none prohibit gun possession by regular drinkers,” they wrote.