Guns or weed? Trump administration says you can't use both.
WASHINGTON – The Trump administration's aggressive defense of gun rights has at least one exception.
The government's lawyers want the Supreme Court to make clear that regular pot smokers – and other drug users − shouldn't be allowed to own firearms.
An appeals court has said a federal law making it a crime for drug users to have a gun can't be used against someone based solely on their past drug use.
Limiting the law to blocking the use of guns while a person is high effectively guts the statute that reduces gun violence, the Justice Department told the Supreme Court. They're asking the justices to overturn the appeals court's decision.
Trump's Justice Department has sided with gun owners in other cases
The department's defense of the law is particularly notable as the Trump administration has sided with gun rights advocates in other cases – including one in which they declined to appeal a lower court's ruling against a federal law setting 21 as the minimum age to own a handgun.
More: Trump DOJ wants Supreme Court to bring down hammer on gun rules
But on the issue of drug use, the government is appealing four cases to the Supreme Court, asking the justices to focus on one involving a dual citizen of the United States and Pakistan who was charged with unlawfully owning a Glock pistol because he regularly smoked marijuana.
The FBI had been monitoring Ali Danial Hemani because of his alleged connection to Iran's paramilitary Revolutionary Guard, which the government has designated a global terrorist group, according to filings. The government also alleges Hemani used and sold promethazine, an antihistamine used to treat allergies and motion sickness that can boost an opioid high, and used cocaine, although he was prosecuted based on his marijuana use.
Hemani's attorneys said the government is trying to 'inflame and disparage' Hemani's character and the only facts that matter are that he was not high when the FBI found the Glock 19 in his Texas home.
Hemani was charged with violating the federal law that prohibits the possession of firearms by a person who 'is an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance.'
More: Supreme Court sides with Biden and upholds regulations of ghost guns to make them traceable
Appeals court ruled past drug use not enough to stop gun ownership
The New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said that the law can't be applied to Hamani under the Supreme Court's landmark 2022 decision that gun prohibitions must be grounded in history that is "consistent with our tradition of gun regulation."
While history and tradition support 'some limits on a presently intoxicated person's right to carry a weapon,' the appeals court said, 'they do not support disarming a sober person based solely on past substance usage.'
The Justice Department said the appeals court got it wrong.
Laws that existed at the time the country was founded restricted the rights of habitual drinkers, even when they were sober, they argued.
'And for about as long as legislatures have regulated drugs, they have prohibited the possession of arms by drug users and addicts – not just by persons under the influence of drugs,' they wrote.
Law used in hundreds of prosecutions, including Hunter Biden's
Since the federal government created its background-check system for firearms in 1998, the federal restriction on drug users has stopped more gun sales than any requirement other than the ban on felons and fugitives owning weapons, according to the filing.
And it's used in hundreds of prosecutions each year, they said.
(Hunter Biden, who was later pardoned by his father during President Joe Biden's final weeks in office, was convicted in 2024 of violating the law by purchasing a gun despite having a known drug addiction.)
Hunter Biden trial recap Joe Biden's son guilty on all charges in historic gun case
Hemani's lawyers argue that the government's interpretation of the law makes no sense when an estimated 19% of Americans have used marijuana and about 32% own a firearm. That means millions of Americans are violating the law that could put them behind bars for up to 15 years, they said in a filing.
The appeals court, Hemani's lawyers said, correctly applied the Supreme Court's past decisions and 'common sense' to rule that 'history and tradition only supports a ban on carrying firearms while intoxicated.'
In addition to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, two other appeals courts have issued rulings that restrict use of the federal ban: both courts ruled there should be individualized assessments of defendants' drug use to determine if their rights could be restricted.
Trump administration touts program to restore gun rights
The Justice Department argues that 'marginal' cases are better addressed on a case-by-case basis, through a federal program the Trump administration restarted that lets individuals petition to have their gun rights restored.
The administration's championship of that program makes it less surprising that the Justice Department is vigorously defending the ban on drug users having guns, said Andrew Willinger, executive director of the Duke Center for Firearms Law, a research center.
In addition, the administration has shown a broad desire to crack down on illegal drug use.
'In some sense, when those two areas are colliding – gun rights and anti-drug policies – it looks like anti-drug policies are going to win out,' he said.
More: Supreme Court rules Mexico can't sue US gunmakers over cartel violence
Willinger said there's a relatively strong chance the Supreme Court will get involved, which the justices tend to do when a lower court strikes down or restricts the application of a federal criminal law – especially if the government asks them to intervene.
But the high court could also wait to see how other appeals courts handle similar cases and how well the Justice Department's program for restoring gun rights addresses these concerns, he said.
The court could announce whether it will take up the issue this fall.
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