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2nd Amendment

Supreme Court Rules Government Cannot Bar Marijuana Users From Owning Guns

A notable 9-0 Second Amendment decision that features three concurring opinions, all of which make good points.

Ilya Somin | 6.18.2026 1:06 PM

AI-generated image.

Today, in United States v. Hemani, the Supreme Court ruled that the Second Amendment prevents the federal government from banning gun ownership by marijuana users. Unusually for a Second Amendment case, the ruling is unanimous. It's a significant application and extension of the Court's 2022 ruling in the 2022 Bruen case, which sought to put more meat on the bones of Second Amendment rights by establishing a "history and tradition" test for reviewing gun regulations.  It's a great moment for those of us who both support strong Second Amendment rights and hate the War on Drugs (elsewhere, I have argued that most of the federal War on Drugs is itself unconstitutional). The ruling also features a joint concurring opinion by Justice Alito joined by Justice Kagan - a rarely seen combination.

Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the opinion for the Court, joined by seven justices in all. Here's an excerpt:

To determine when the government infringes the Second Amendment, we begin by asking whether the Amendment's terms cover the conduct in question. Bruen, 597 U. S., at 24. If so, the Constitution "presumptively" protects it. Ibid. To overcome that presumption, the government then bears the burden of showing its regulatory efforts are "consistent with the Nation's historical tradition of firearm regulation."  Ibid….

§922(g)(3)'s unlawful user provision burdens conduct presumptively protected by the Second Amendment. After all, that statute bans a class of people including Mr. Hemani
from possessing essentially any firearm for any purpose. As a result, the government acknowledges, it has a burden to carry….

To meet its burden of showing a law like that is consistent with the Nation's tradition of firearm regulation, the government relies on an analogy to what it calls "habitual drunkard" laws. These laws, the government submits, enjoy deep roots in the country's history and are "relevantly similar" to the regulation it wishes to enforce against Mr.
Hemani….

We disagree. We appreciate that drugs and guns can sometimes make for a dangerous mix. We appreciate, too, that the government's effort to analogize a modern statute
addressing drug use to historical laws must be approached with a sensitivity to the fact that many drugs well known today were unknown in early America. As we have put it,
the Second Amendment "can, and must, apply to circumstances beyond those the Founders specifically anticipated." Bruen, 597 U. S., at 28. But, even taking all that
into account, the government cannot carry the burden it has set for itself. We decide cases "based on the historical record" and arguments "compiled by the parties" before us. Id., at 26, n. 6. And the habitual drunkard laws on which the government relies here differ dramatically from §922(g)(3)'s unlawful user provision on every single metric the government invites us to consider: They targeted different kinds of people, did so for different purposes, and operated in different ways. Whether any one of these problems taken in isolation would prove fatal to the government's cause, we need not decide. Taken cumulatively, we hold,........

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