Supreme Court agrees to review law that bars drug users from having firearms

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court agreed Monday to decide whether a federal law that bars frequent users of illegal drugs from possessing firearms violates the Constitution’s right to bear arms.

The Trump administration, which is defending the law despite its overall support for gun rights, had asked the justices to hear its challenge of an appeals court ruling in favor of Ali Daniel Hemani, an alleged regular user of marijuana who was charged with violating the law.

It is the same law that Hunter Biden, the son of former President Joe Biden, was convicted under in June 2024 before his father pardoned him.

The case is the second on gun rights the Supreme Court has taken up in recent weeks. On Oct. 3, the justices agreed to review whether a Hawaii law that imposes new restrictions on where people with concealed carry permits can take handguns also violates the Constitution’s Second Amendment.

The court’s 6-3 conservative majority generally backs gun rights but, until the recent flurry of activity, had appeared reluctant to take up new cases on the issue.

The court expanded the right to bear arms in a major 2022 ruling that relied on a historical understanding of the Second Amendment, but it appeared to backtrack slightly two years later. Last year, it upheld a federal law that prohibits people subject to domestic violence restraining orders from possessing firearms.

Lower courts have been wrestling over how to interpret long-standing gun restrictions in light of the Supreme Court’s new history-based approach. One of them is the federal law at issue in this case.

Lower courts are divided over whether the restriction on gun ownership for frequent drug users infringes on the Second Amendment. Hemani’s case arose in Texas, where he successfully challenged his indictment in district court. The New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court upheld that decision, applying a new precedent it set a year earlier in a different case.

In that ruling, the appeals court concluded that the law could not be constitutionally enforced merely because the government alleges someone is a regular drug user. The government instead must show that the gun owner was under the influence of the drug at the time of the arrest, the appeals court ruled.

Prosecutors made no such showing in Hemani’s case.

Solicitor General J. Dean Sauer said in court papers that Hemani, a joint citizen of the United States and Pakistan, was already on the FBI’s radar when he was arrested. The government has asserted that Hemani and his family have ties with Iranian entities hostile to the United States.

A handgun, marijuana and cocaine were found when the FBI searched his home in 2022.

While the Second Amendment is “a fundamental right that is essential to ordered liberty,” Sauer wrote, there are “narrow circumstances” in which it is acceptable for the government to limit it.

The restriction at issue in the case is a “modest, modern analogue of much harsher founding-era restrictions on habitual drunkards, and so it stands solidly within our Nation’s history and tradition of regulation,” he added.

Hemani’s lawyers urged the court not to hear the case, saying the appeals court had correctly interpreted the historical tradition of disarming intoxicated people.

The appeals court correctly concluded that “history and tradition showed laws banning carrying weapons while under the influence of alcohol, but none barred gun possession by regular drinkers,” they wrote.