The Biden administration isn’t the first to look the other way when states opt to allow marijuana use. Both Obama and Trump did the same, after all, so this didn’t just start.
However, the Biden administration has also gone out of its way to disarm anyone who uses marijuana lawfully under state law.
One such party is a Pennsylvania prosecutor who uses medical marijuana. This, of course, sparked a lawsuit, and the Biden administration is now calling on the lawsuit to be dismissed by the court.
In a new federal court filing defending the government’s ban on cannabis users owning guns, the Department of Justice (DOJ) argues that the ongoing restriction is “analogous to laws disarming the intoxicated” and other historical laws “disarming many disparate groups that the government believed presented a danger with firearms.”
“Taken together, these laws establish the principle that governments can disarm groups deemed dangerous with firearms,” the DOJ’s new brief asserts. “But even if a closer connection in the reason for dangerousness were required, that connection is provided by the laws targeting the intoxicated and mentally ill…who were disarmed based on concerns about impaired judgment and lack of self-control.”
The DOJ brief is the latest development in a case filed by a Pennsylvania prosecutor suing the federal government over its ban on gun ownership by cannabis users. It comes two weeks after lawyers for the official, Warren County District Attorney Robert Greene, asked the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania to allow the matter to proceed to trial.
DOJ, meanwhile, is asking the court to dismiss the case.
Is it analogous to disarming people while intoxicated?
Not really.
The laws of that earlier era prohibited people who were intoxicated then and there from carrying or using firearms. It didn’t preclude them from owning them or using them when they weren’t under the influence. However, the prohibition on medical marijuana users having guns goes well beyond that.
I get that it’s not like you can give a breathalyzer test for marijuana use, but that’s very much beside the point.
It seems the plaintiff’s attorneys agree with me.
In the plaintiffs’ earlier brief, attorneys for Greene and others argued that the firearm prohibition for cannabis users is distinct from other laws prohibiting gun ownership by potentially dangerous individuals, noting that the other restrictions “only permitted the deprivation of one’s Second Amendment rights after a hearing, providing for due process, and then, only temporarily.”
While the government frames its marijuana gun ban as similarly temporary, plaintiffs said that in practice the prohibition is much broader.
“While the Government disingenuously contends throughout its brief that the challenged regulations only ‘impose a temporary prohibition on firearms possession and receipt during the time period that a person is actively engaged in unlawful drug use,’” the plaintiffs’ last brief said, “the truth of the matter, which the Government elects not to disclose to this Court, is that…an unlawful user includes those ‘even though the substance is not being used at the precise time the person seeks to acquire a firearm or receives or possesses a firearm.’”
And let’s be real, we saw a prime example of this with Hunter Biden, who was found to be a drug user when he bought a firearm. He was convicted not for being under the influence while purchasing a firearm but of being a habitual drug user in a more general sense.
Greene, by comparison, is using something that is being given for medical purposes, which should make it plenty different all on its own.
I’m not surprised that the Department of Justice wants the lawsuit tossed.
That doesn’t mean they’re right to do so, though. They want it tossed because they’re concerned they’ll lose on the merits of the case. They’re also hoping they can keep it from ending up before the Supreme Court, which may or may not decide to uphold the law, but it’s kind of a crapshoot and they know it.
Frankly, I think they should get used to disappointment, but after Rahimi, I’m not completely certain I shouldn’t take my own advice.
Either way, though, I think the government is making an ask they’re almost expected to make, and I don’t think they’re going to like the outcome of this, at least.
Read the full article here
