Federal law says that if you use marijuana — even in a state where it's legal — you forfeit your right to own a firearm. The penalty for ignoring that: up to 15 years in federal prison.

The Supreme Court just struck that law down. Nine to zero.

The case didn't start as a gun case. Federal investigators came after Ali Hemani, a Texas resident and dual U.S.-Pakistan citizen, on suspected terrorism-related charges. They found nothing. What they found instead was that Hemani possessed firearms while using marijuana about every other day. The Department of Justice then charged him under 18 U.S.C. §922(g)(3), the statute that makes firearm possession a federal crime for "unlawful controlled substance users."

The charge carried up to 15 years.

Justice Neil Gorsuch, who wrote the majority opinion, dismantled the government's justification piece by piece. The feds relied on historical "habitual drunkard" statutes from the early American republic — laws that restricted firearms access for people whose alcohol use had rendered them demonstrably incapacitated. The Court found the analogy didn't hold. Those laws targeted individuals who were functionally impaired. There was no evidence Hemani's marijuana use made him dangerous or incapacitated in any comparable way.

"Whether any one of these problems taken in isolation would prove fatal," Gorsuch wrote, "taken cumulatively, we hold, they certainly do."

The concurrences are worth reading alongside the majority. Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Justice Elena Kagan, wrote separately to draw the comparison more directly: "Marijuana use today is like alcohol use at the founding... widespread and increasingly considered socially acceptable." Alito and Kagan finding common ground on a Second Amendment case reflects where the government's legal theory actually stood.

Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson joined Alito's concurrence while registering their ongoing objections to the Bruen framework. Even disagreeing with the methodology, they couldn't find a basis for upholding this statute. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote separately as well.

The practical reach of this ruling is substantial. In states where marijuana is now legal — roughly half the country — gun owners who used it were technically violating federal law under §922(g)(3). That exposure is now gone. The ruling doesn't change federal marijuana law, but it severs the automatic connection the government drew between marijuana use and forfeiture of Second Amendment rights, absent any showing of actual dangerousness or incapacity.

The government's position, as Gorsuch summarized it, was that it "may automatically strip Mr. Hemani of his Second Amendment right" and "imprison him for up to 15 years." That argument found no support on a Court that rarely agrees on anything.

The Second Amendment is not a privilege the government extends to people it approves of. It's a right. And the mechanism used here — find nothing on the charge you originally wanted, then locate a different statute — was exactly what nine justices, from Clarence Thomas to Ketanji Brown Jackson, concluded the Constitution doesn't permit.