The bottom line
The Supreme Court has agreed to hear United States v. Hemani, a direct challenge to the federal prohibition on firearm possession by unlawful drug users under 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(3). This is the statute that turns someone into a felon for owning a gun simply because they use marijuana — not while intoxicated, not while armed and high, but ever, as a lifestyle. It has no grounding in American history, it fails the Bruen test, and the Supreme Court needs to say so. The question is whether they will.
Attribution from Bearing Freedom. Watch the original video. Commentary, not legal advice.
What the case is and how it got here
On October 21, 2025, the Supreme Court announced it would take up United States v. Hemani, a case out of the Eastern District of Texas involving a man named Ali Danial Hemani who was indicted for possessing a firearm while being an unlawful drug user. FBI agents found a Glock 19 alongside less than a gram of cocaine and about two ounces of marijuana. He was not intoxicated at the time. He was not accused of using the firearm in the commission of any crime. He simply possessed both a gun and drugs, which under the letter of 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(3), makes him a felon.
The Fifth Circuit threw out the charge on Second Amendment grounds. The court’s reasoning was precise: while the government might have a case against someone who wields a firearm while actively intoxicated, there is “no historical justification for disarming a sober citizen not presently under an impairing influence.” That is the exact right analysis under Bruen. You start with the text of the Second Amendment, you look for a historical tradition of analogous regulation, and if you can’t find one that actually matches, the law fails. The government couldn’t find one. The Fifth Circuit said so. Now the Supreme Court gets to decide.
Why this statute should never have existed
Let me be clear about what 922(g)(3) actually does, because the coverage of this case has been sloppy about it. The statute makes it a federal felony for anyone who “is an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance” to possess a firearm. This language is extraordinarily broad. It does not require intoxication. It does not require any act of violence. It does not require any connection between the drug use and the firearm at all. A person who smoked marijuana once a month ago and has a shotgun in their home is, under the strict reading of this statute, a felon.
The controlled substances covered are not limited to the ones most people think of. Adderall taken off-prescription is a controlled substance. Prescription painkillers borrowed from a family member fall under it. Even some medications that people use routinely without any awareness that they’re touching Schedule I or II classifications could theoretically sweep someone in. The law doesn’t ask whether you were impaired. It doesn’t ask whether you were dangerous. It asks only whether you used a substance the federal government has classified as controlled, and if the answer is yes, your Second Amendment rights are gone.
This language traces back to the Gun Control Act of 1968, which was passed in the wake of the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. The political climate was raw and the legislation was drafted fast. The specific provision on drug users had no serious historical analysis behind it at the time. It was not drawn from any longstanding tradition of disarming the intoxicated or the addicted. It was new. It was 1968. And by the Supreme Court’s own standard in Bruen — which requires that modern gun regulations be consistent with the historical tradition of firearm regulation at the time of the founding — something invented in 1968 to address 1968 politics is not a historical tradition. It’s just a law.
The Bruen test and why 922(g)(3) fails it
In New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen, decided in June 2022, the Supreme Court established that courts must evaluate Second Amendment challenges by asking whether the regulation is consistent with the historical tradition of firearm regulation in this country. The government bears the burden. It must identify a historical analogue — a law from the founding era, or at least from the nineteenth century, that is “relevantly similar” in how much it burdens the right and why.
The government’s argument in Hemani rests primarily on historical laws that regulated the carrying of firearms by “habitual drunkards.” The claim is that these laws establish a tradition of disarming people who are impaired by substance use, and that 922(g)(3) fits within that tradition.
This argument fails for a straightforward reason that Hemani’s legal team identified plainly: there is a critical distinction between laws that prohibited carrying weapons while under the influence of alcohol and laws that barred gun ownership by regular drinkers. The historical laws targeted active intoxication. They said you cannot carry a weapon when you are drunk right now. Not one of them said that a person who has a drink every evening is therefore permanently disqualified from owning a firearm. The government is trying to extrapolate from “drunk with a gun” to “person who uses drugs, ever” — and those are not the same thing. The analogy collapses.
During oral argument in March 2026, Justice Gorsuch drove this point home with a question that cut right to it. Historical Americans drank heavily by modern standards. John Adams reportedly started his morning with a tankard of hard cider. James Madison allegedly put away a pint of whiskey a day. If the historical tradition of “habitual drunkard” disarmament applied to regular drinkers, virtually every Founder would have been disqualified from owning a firearm. Nobody believed that. Nobody legislated that. The historical analogues the government points to were about acute intoxication, not about lifestyle.
The justices, across ideological lines, came out of oral argument visibly skeptical of the government’s position. Even legal observers who expected a fairly government-friendly court on gun questions noted that the questioning was harder on the government than anticipated. The Duke Firearms Law Center’s executive director described the court as “more skeptical, honestly, than I expected.”
The real strategy behind laws like this
I want to talk about the larger pattern here because I think it matters more than any individual case.
922(g)(3) is not an isolated quirk. It is one piece of a systematic anti-gun strategy built around what I call reasonable-sounding encroachment. The idea is simple: find a category of person or a type of gun or a type of location that sounds scary when described in abstract terms, and then write a prohibition broad enough to capture people who are not actually the scary scenario you were describing.
The drug user prohibition sounds reasonable if you imagine someone who is high out of their mind waving a firearm around. But that’s not what the statute covers. It covers someone who smoked pot three weeks ago and has a rifle in a safe. The school zone provision sounds reasonable until you realize that a thousand-yard radius around a school encompasses most of an urban neighborhood, making it physically impossible to drive home from work with a legal firearm in your car. Red flag laws sound reasonable until you realize that you can lose your guns before you’ve been convicted of anything, or even formally accused of anything, based on an allegation alone.
The pattern is consistent. Describe the worst-case scenario. Draft a law broad enough to catch ordinary people nowhere near the worst case. Then defend it by pointing to the worst case whenever anyone challenges it. And over time, layer by layer, you have fewer people legally able to own guns in fewer places under more restrictions. That is the plan, and 922(g)(3) is one brick in that wall.
Bruen gave us the tool to dismantle it brick by brick. The historical tradition test is not a technicality. It is the Supreme Court saying that the Second Amendment has real content, that it protects real people from real overreach, and that the government has to justify its restrictions by showing they fit within what this country has historically understood to be permissible. The answer on 922(g)(3) is that it does not fit. It has never fit. It was invented in 1968 out of political convenience, not constitutional tradition.
What I think the court will actually do
I’m a realist about this. I think Hemani himself will probably lose. The fact pattern is bad — text messages suggesting ties to an Iranian militia were found during the traffic stop that surfaced the charges, and that kind of thing influences how courts think about a case even when they’re not supposed to let it. Bad cases make bad law. We’ve seen it before. The Rahimi case involved an alleged domestic abuser, and the ruling — while still a Second Amendment win in several important ways — was shaped by the fact that the defendant was not sympathetic.
But here’s why I’m not giving up on Hemani even if Hemani loses. The Supreme Court doesn’t just rule yes or no. It writes an opinion. And the opinion sets the standard that every lower court has to follow going forward. What I think — and hope — we get out of this case is a framework that says something like: drug use alone is not sufficient to categorically disarm someone absent other aggravating factors, and the government cannot strip constitutional rights without a showing of actual dangerousness tied to the specific individual, not to a statistical category.
A ruling along those lines, even if Hemani himself ends up convicted, would be a substantial Second Amendment win. It would mean that a marijuana user who has no other disqualifying factors could not be prosecuted under 922(g)(3) in the future. It would require courts to look at the actual person and the actual circumstances rather than just checking a box that says “drug user” and calling it a day. That is meaningful protection for a lot of Americans who are currently operating as inadvertent felons without knowing it.
The Second Amendment movement builds brick by brick. Heller established individual rights. Bruen gave us the historical tradition test. McDonald incorporated the right against the states. Each of those was a brick. This case is another brick. We may not get the full wall today. But we’re getting closer to it, and the justices sitting on that bench right now are asking exactly the right questions.
Attribution from Bearing Freedom. Watch the original video. Commentary, not legal advice.
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