All nine justices agreed Thursday that the federal government cannot strip a Texas man of his Second Amendment rights simply because he smokes marijuana, a ruling that narrows the same statute prosecutors once used to convict Hunter Biden.
The decision in the case of Ali Danial Hemani marks the latest expansion of gun rights since the Court's landmark 2022 Second Amendment framework, and it landed with a force that few anticipated: a 9-0 vote cutting across every ideological line on the bench.
Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the majority, held that the federal law prohibiting firearm possession by unlawful users of controlled substances, codified as §922(g)(3), was unconstitutional as applied to Hemani, a man who admitted to smoking marijuana about every other day and kept a handgun in his home for self-defense. FBI agents discovered the weapon during a raid. Prosecutors charged him with a felony that carries a sentence of up to 15 years.
No justice dissented from the outcome. Justices Samuel Alito and Elena Kagan concurred in the judgment only, filing a separate opinion. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote his own concurrence, as Breitbart reported.
The federal government tried to defend the 1968 Gun Control Act provision by pointing to colonial-era laws that disarmed "habitual drunkards." The Court rejected the comparison across the board. As Fox News Digital reported, Gorsuch wrote that those historical laws targeted people whose substance abuse had left them unable to manage their own lives, not casual or regular users.
"The government's analogy fails under every measure it asks us to consider. The historical laws on which it relies targeted different kinds of people, did so for different reasons, and operated in different ways."
Gorsuch drove the point further by noting just how broad the modern statute reaches. He observed that under the government's theory, the ban could extend to "a college student who routinely uses a friend's Adderall to cram for exams" or "a husband who regularly takes his wife's prescription Ambien to sleep."
That kind of sweep, the majority warned, threatens to swallow the constitutional right it claims to regulate. Gorsuch wrote that affording the government "broad power to designate any group as dangerous and thereby disqualify its members from having a gun" would risk allowing it to "quickly swallow" the Second Amendment.
The Court has been active this term across several major legal fronts, including cases touching immigration, transgender athletes, and other constitutional questions, a busy docket that shows no sign of slowing.
One of the sharpest threads in Gorsuch's opinion targeted the federal government's own conduct. More than half of U.S. states now allow licensed dealers to sell marijuana to adults. The federal government has reduced marijuana enforcement and pursued efforts to move the drug to a less restrictive schedule.
Gorsuch noted that reality plainly, as reported by Newsmax:
"Whatever one thinks of these developments, the federal government has not just tolerated them; it helped fuel them. All of which leaves it awkwardly positioned to suggest that the millions of Americans who now regularly use marijuana are categorically and unusually dangerous."
That passage captures the core absurdity. Washington spent years winking at state-level marijuana legalization, easing enforcement, and even exploring rescheduling, then turned around and told courts that anyone who uses the substance is too dangerous to own a firearm. The justices, all nine of them, weren't buying it.
Justice Alito, joined by Justice Kagan, agreed the government's case failed on its own terms. He wrote that "the mismatch between the Government's historical analogues and the theory on which the Government defends the constitutionality of §922(g)(3) as applied to respondent is clear."
The Court was careful to limit the scope of its holding. Gorsuch wrote explicitly: "We do not address efforts to ban addicts, or those presently intoxicated, from possessing a firearm." Prosecutors never alleged that Hemani was addicted to marijuana, had used a firearm while intoxicated, had threatened anyone, or posed a danger to himself or others.
That distinction matters. The ruling does not open the door for drug addicts or intoxicated individuals to carry weapons. It does not touch felon-in-possession laws. It addresses one specific application of one specific statute to one specific set of facts.
But the practical reach extends well beyond Ali Hemani's living room in Texas. John Commerford, executive director of the NRA Institute for Legislative Action, told Fox News Digital that the decision has wide significance:
"The Court rejected the government's attempt to bar millions of otherwise law-abiding citizens from possessing firearms based solely on their status as occasional marijuana users. As the NRA argued in its amicus brief, there is no historical justification for disarming people for engaging in nonviolent conduct."
The case drew an unusual coalition. Both the NRA and the ACLU supported Hemani's challenge, while gun safety groups sided with the Trump administration in defending the law. That alignment tells you something about how far the statute had drifted from any defensible constitutional mooring.
The ruling also follows a pattern of recent decisions in which the Court has reached clear outcomes with notable voting alignments. In another case this term, the Court backed police in a D.C. traffic stop dispute with only Justice Jackson dissenting.
The same federal statute, §922(g)(3), was used to convict Hunter Biden in 2024. He was later pardoned by his father. The New York Post noted during oral arguments that a majority of justices from both conservative and liberal wings expressed skepticism about the law's vagueness and breadth. Justice Gorsuch pressed the government's attorney at the time: "What if he took one gummy bear with a medical prescription in Colorado? Let's say he had one to help him sleep every other day. Disarm him for life?"
The pardon rendered the Biden conviction moot, but the constitutional question lived on through Hemani's case. And the answer the Court delivered Thursday leaves no ambiguity about the statute's constitutional deficiency, at least as applied to regular users who are not addicts, not intoxicated, and not shown to be dangerous.
In a separate but related development this term, Justice Thomas questioned the legal foundation of another longstanding doctrine in a unanimous ruling, continuing his pattern of pressing the Court to revisit assumptions embedded in federal law.
Carrie Severino, president of the Judicial Crisis Network, framed the ruling in historical terms that matched the Court's own reasoning:
"It's a good day for the Second Amendment when all nine justices can agree to protect gun rights. The mere fact of illegal drug use, without more, isn't enough to justify prosecution for gun ownership. Historically, 'habitual drunkards' who habitually lost use of their reason could have their rights restricted, but not just regular drinkers, even including Founding Fathers like John Adams, who drank 'a tankard of hard cider' with breakfast, or James Madison, who 'consumed a pint of whisky daily.' Hemani, who used marijuana a few times a week, doesn't fit the historical mold of a 'habitual drunkard' whose rights can be limited on those grounds alone."
Tyler Yzaguirre, president of the Second Amendment Institute, said the decision reinforces the principle "that firearm restrictions must be consistent with our nation's historical tradition of gun regulation, not modern political preferences."
Amy Swearer, a senior legal fellow at Advancing American Freedom, offered a measured take aimed at preempting the inevitable reaction from gun control advocates. She told Fox News Digital: "Gun control activists will inevitably claim that the sky is falling. It isn't. The ruling still leaves the government room to disarm addicts or prosecute people who possess firearms while actively intoxicated."
That framing is worth taking seriously. The ruling does not dismantle the federal firearms regulatory framework. It corrects one overbroad application of it, an application so constitutionally deficient that not a single justice could defend it.
The Court's active term has also produced decisions with sharp political consequences in other areas, including a recent refusal to revive a Democratic-drawn congressional map in Virginia.
Several questions remain open. The Court did not address whether the government could constitutionally bar firearm possession by people proven to be addicted to controlled substances, a category distinct from regular users. It did not resolve whether drug users who have been shown to pose a danger to others could be disarmed. And it did not speak to felon-in-possession statutes, which rest on different constitutional footing.
The full vote breakdown beyond Gorsuch's majority and the Alito-Kagan concurrence also deserves closer attention as the opinion circulates. The lower court history, which courts previously ruled, and how, was not detailed in the initial reporting.
What is clear is this: a 1968 statute that treated every casual marijuana user in America as too dangerous to own a firearm has now been measured against the Constitution and found wanting. The government's own tolerance of widespread marijuana use made its position all the harder to defend.
When Washington spends decades looking the other way on marijuana and then tries to strip gun rights from millions of people for using it, nine justices, from Gorsuch to Kagan, will notice the contradiction. And they did.
