WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court agreed Monday to decide whether a federal law barring frequent users of illegal drugs from owning a firearm violates the constitutional right to bear arms.
The Trump administration, which defends the law despite its overall support for gun rights, had asked the justices to hear its challenge to an appeals court ruling in favor of Ali Daniel Hemani, an alleged regular marijuana user accused of violating the law.
It’s the same law under which Hunter Biden, the son of former President Joe Biden, was convicted in June 2024 before being pardoned by his father.
This case is the second on gun rights that the Supreme Court has considered in recent weeks. On Oct. 3, the justices agreed to consider whether a Hawaiian law that places new restrictions on where people with concealed carry permits can bring handguns also violates the Constitution’s Second Amendment.
The Court’s conservative majority, 6-3, generally supports gun rights, but, until the recent flurry of activity, seemed reluctant to take up new cases on the issue.
The court expanded the right to bear arms in a major 2022 decision that relied on a historical understanding of the Second Amendment, but appeared to backtrack slightly two years later. In 2024, he upheld a federal law that prohibits people subject to domestic violence restraining orders from owning firearms.
Lower courts are grappling with how to interpret longstanding gun restrictions in light of the Supreme Court’s historic new approach. One of them is the federal law at issue in this latest case.
Lower courts are now divided on whether restricting gun ownership for frequent drug users violates the Second Amendment. Hemani’s case occurred in Texas, where he successfully challenged his indictment in district court. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court, based in New Orleans, upheld that decision, applying a new precedent it had established a year earlier in another case.
In that decision, the appeals court concluded that the law could not be constitutionally enforced simply because the government claimed a person was a regular drug user. Instead, the government must show that the gun owner was under the influence of drugs at the time of his arrest, the appeals court ruled.
Prosecutors made no such evidence in Hemani’s case.
Solicitor General J. Dean Sauer said in court documents that Hemani, a joint citizen of the United States and Pakistan, was already on the FBI’s radar when he was arrested. The government claimed that Hemani and his family had ties to Iranian entities hostile to the United States.
A handgun, marijuana and cocaine were found when the FBI raided his home in 2022.
Although the Second Amendment is “a fundamental right essential to ordered liberty,” Sauer wrote, there are “limited circumstances” in which it is acceptable for the government to limit it.
The restriction at issue in this case is a “modest, modern analogue of the much more severe Founding-era restrictions on habitual drunkards, and it therefore fits firmly into our nation’s history and regulatory tradition,” he added.
Hemani’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 showed laws prohibiting the carrying of weapons while under the influence of alcohol, but none prohibiting the possession of weapons by regular drinkers,” they wrote.
