A federal judge in Oklahoma ruled Friday that a law that prohibits marijuana users from owning firearms is unconstitutional.
The ruling is the latest challenge to firearms regulations after the conservative majority on the US Supreme Court set new standards for reviewing the nation’s firearms laws.
AR-15 style rifles are displayed for sale at Firearms Unknown, a gun store in Oceanside, California, USA, April 12, 2021
(REUTERS/Bing Guan/File photo)
US District Judge Patrick Wyrick in Oklahoma City dismissed an indictment against Jared Michael Harrison, who was charged in August with violating a federal law making it illegal for “illegal users or addicts of controlled substances” to possess firearms. .
Harrison’s lawyers had argued that the portion of the federal firearms law focused on drug users or addicts was inconsistent with the nation’s storied tradition of gun regulation, echoing what the US Supreme Court ruled. USA last year in a case known as New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. bruen. That case set new standards for interpreting the Second Amendment.
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Federal prosecutors, on the other hand, had argued that the portion of the law focused on drug users is “consistent with a long historical tradition in the United States of disarming suspected risk-takers, namely criminals, the mentally ill, and the intoxicated.” .
Gerry Lee practices his shooting skills at the Clark Brothers Gun Store and Shooting Range in Warrenton, Virginia, about 48 miles from Washington, DC, on January 16, 2020.
(EVA HAMBACH/AFP via Getty Images)
Wyrick agreed with Harrison’s attorneys, ruling Friday that federal prosecutors’ arguments that Harrison’s status as a marijuana user “justifies stripping him of his fundamental right to possess a firearm … is not a means constitutionally permissible to disarm Harrison”.
“But the mere use of marijuana does not have any of the characteristics that the nation’s history and tradition of gun regulation supports,” Wyrick said.
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The decision comes after the New Orleans-based US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled Thursday that a federal law that bars people with domestic violence restraining orders from having the constitutional right to own guns of fire.
