The Supreme Court ruled 9-0 on Thursday that the federal government cannot prosecute a Texas marijuana user for possessing a firearm, declaring the application of a decades-old gun law unconstitutional under the Second Amendment. The decision in United States v. Hemani marks the latest expansion of gun rights from a court that has reshaped firearms law in recent years, and it carries an unavoidable footnote involving Hunter Biden.
Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion, rejecting what the Washington Examiner described as the Department of Justice's "expansive theory" that any regular marijuana use automatically strips a citizen of Second Amendment protections. The government, Gorsuch wrote, was asking the court to accept that "anyone who regularly uses marijuana is categorically violent and dangerous without any further showing."
All nine justices said no.
The case began in 2022, when federal agents raided the home of Ali Danial Hemani, a Texas man. During the raid, authorities found a firearm and Hemani acknowledged that he used marijuana "about every other day." He was not accused of violence. He was not alleged to have used the weapon while intoxicated. He was charged solely because he possessed a gun while being a regular user of a controlled substance.
The statute at issue, the Gun Control Act of 1968, codified at 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(3), makes it a federal crime for any "unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance" to possess a firearm. The penalty runs up to 15 years in prison.
Gorsuch's opinion acknowledged the obvious tension between firearms and drugs. "We appreciate that drugs and guns can sometimes make for a dangerous mix," he wrote. But the government's position went far beyond targeting dangerous individuals. It sought to "automatically strip Hemani of his Second Amendment right to possess a firearm" and imprison him for more than a decade based only on the showing that he "regularly uses any amount of any controlled substance."
That standard, the court found, swept in ordinary Americans who pose no threat. Gorsuch pointed to examples: "a husband who regularly takes his wife's prescription Ambien to sleep" and "a college student who routinely uses a friend's Adderall to cram for exams." Under the government's reading, both could face federal prosecution and years behind bars for owning a gun.
Gorsuch stressed that the decision is narrow. The court explicitly declined to rule on whether the government could bar firearms from addicts or from individuals whose drug use renders them a danger to themselves or others. "We do not address efforts to ban addicts, or those presently intoxicated, from possessing a firearm," Gorsuch wrote.
But the practical reach is considerable. More than half of U.S. states now permit some form of legal marijuana use, and millions of Americans consume it regularly. The federal government, Gorsuch observed, played a role in that expansion, then turned around and tried to criminalize those same users for exercising a constitutional right.
The opinion did not hold back on the contradiction. The federal government "has not just tolerated" the growth of legal marijuana across the states, Gorsuch wrote. "It helped fuel them." That history, he concluded, left the government "awkwardly positioned to suggest that the millions of Americans who now regularly use marijuana are categorically and unusually dangerous," as Newsmax reported.
The ruling continues a line of decisions expanding Second Amendment protections that began with the court's landmark 2022 Bruen framework, which required gun regulations to be consistent with the nation's historical tradition of firearms regulation.
The Hemani case produced political alliances that would have seemed impossible a decade ago. Both the ACLU and the NRA supported Hemani's position. Gun safety groups, meanwhile, sided with the Trump administration, which had defended the statute.
ACLU Legal Director Cecillia Wang said the ruling "makes it clear that the government cannot make it a crime for people to own a gun simply because they use marijuana," Breitbart reported.
Amy Swearer of Advancing American Freedom framed the decision in terms that should resonate with every conservative who takes individual rights seriously: "The Court's decision today affirms one of the most basic tenets of the Second Amendment, the government may only disarm people whom it can prove are violent and unusually dangerous, based on individualized proof presented in legal proceedings."
That principle, individualized proof, not blanket categories, sits at the heart of what the court decided. The government wanted the power to strip constitutional rights from entire classes of people without showing that any particular person posed any particular threat. A unanimous court told them they cannot.
The ruling inevitably raises the name Hunter Biden. The president's son was convicted by a jury in June 2024 on three counts under the same Gun Control Act provision, two counts of making false statements about his drug use while purchasing a firearm in 2018, and one count of possessing a firearm while unlawfully using drugs. He faced up to 25 years in prison on the combined charges.
He never served a day. Then-President Joe Biden pardoned his son in December 2024, before the sentencing phase could begin. The Daily Mail noted the direct parallel between the two cases, both men charged under the same statute for possessing firearms while using controlled substances.
The Supreme Court's ruling does not affect Hunter Biden's case. The pardon rendered the conviction moot long before the justices took up Hemani's challenge. But the juxtaposition is hard to ignore. An ordinary Texan had to fight his case all the way to the Supreme Court to vindicate his constitutional rights. The son of a president got a pardon during his father's final weeks in office.
The attorney behind the Hemani ruling has argued that the decision revives the Second Amendment's strongest analytical framework. If that assessment holds, Thursday's opinion will shape firearms litigation for years.
The decision is likely to decrease federal prosecutions of casual drug users found in possession of firearms. That much follows directly from the court's reasoning: if the government cannot strip Second Amendment rights based solely on regular use of a controlled substance, the legal basis for those prosecutions evaporates.
What the ruling does not do is open the door to armed drug dealers or violent addicts. Gorsuch went out of his way to note that the court did "not even address" whether the government could prosecute someone whose drug use "renders him a danger to himself or others." The government retains tools to go after genuinely dangerous individuals. It simply lost the power to treat every marijuana user in America as a presumptive criminal for owning a gun.
The distinction matters. The federal government had argued it did not need to prove that an occasional illegal drug user "is regularly incapacitated." In other words, it wanted the ability to prosecute without any showing of danger, just status. The court rejected that position entirely.
This ruling arrives during a term in which the Supreme Court has delivered several landmark decisions reshaping constitutional law. The unanimity in Hemani is itself remarkable. In an era of 5-4 and 6-3 splits on nearly every contested question, all nine justices agreed that the government overreached.
The court's recent gun-related decisions have moved in different directions depending on the specific question presented. But on the core principle, that the Second Amendment protects individual rights and the government must justify restrictions with more than categorical assumptions, the trajectory is clear.
Strip away the marijuana politics and the Hunter Biden comparisons, and the Hemani ruling stands for a principle that should trouble no one who believes in limited government: Washington cannot erase a constitutional right without proving you've done something to warrant it.
The government wanted a shortcut. It wanted to declare millions of Americans categorically dangerous based on a single behavior, without evidence, without a hearing, without individualized proof. Nine justices, appointed by presidents of both parties, said the Constitution does not permit it.
For Ali Danial Hemani, the system eventually worked. He fought a federal prosecution to the highest court in the land and won. For Hunter Biden, the system never had to work at all. His father made sure of that.
That contrast tells you more about how power operates in Washington than any Supreme Court opinion ever could.