Supreme Court unanimously limits use of gun law used to prosecute Hunter Biden
The Supreme Court sided Thursday with a "habitual" marijuana user who challenged a federal law banning anyone who uses illegal drugs from legally possessing a firearm, a Second Amendment case...
By Fox News · Fox News
The Supreme Court sided Thursday with a "habitual" marijuana user who challenged a federal law banning anyone who uses illegal drugs from legally possessing a firearm, a Second Amendment case that tested the limits of restricting gun ownership. The court ruled the law, which was used to prosecute Hunter Biden , was overbroad and improperly deprived the man at the center of the case of his right to possess a firearm in his home. But the high court also said in its narrow ruling the law limits but does not end government power to take guns from drug users. "We do not address efforts to ban addicts, or those presently intoxicated, from possessing a firearm," Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for the majority. The case involved a Texas man charged with a felony after FBI agents raiding his home found a handgun he kept for self-defense and he admitted to smoking marijuana every other day. SUPREME COURT UNANIMOUSLY STRIKES DOWN GUN LAW USED TO PROSECUTE HUNTER BIDEN In an opinion written by Gorsuch, the court held that the government's prosecution of Ali Hemani under a federal law prohibiting firearm possession by unlawful users of controlled substances violated the Second Amendment. Justices Samuel Alito and Elena Kagan concurred only in the judgment. The government argued that people who regularly use illegal drugs could be disarmed based on historical laws that restricted the rights of so-called " habitual drunkards ," but the court said the old laws the government relied on were too different from the modern gun restriction to justify it. "The government's analogy fails under every measure it asks us to consider," Gorsuch wrote. "The historical laws on which it relies targeted different kinds of people, did so for different reasons, and operated in different ways." The court said the old laws focused on people whose substance abuse left them unable to manage their lives, while the federal law broadly covered regular drug users regardless of whether they posed a threat to an…