The court, in an appeal in the case of Patrick Darnell Daniels of Gulfport, Mississippi, found unconstitutional the 1968 law that bars an individual from lawful firearm possession if they are an “unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance.”
Daniels, who was arrested by local police and a DEA agent in April 2022 after a traffic stop for a missing license plate found marijuana cigarette butts in the ashtray and two loaded firearms, was charged in a federal district court on the “unlawful user” statute and given nearly four years in prison in addition to having his Second Amendment rights stripped away for life. While Daniels had admitted to smoking marijuana since high school and consumed the “Devil’s Lettuce” about 14 times a month, he was not otherwise a lawbreaker.
The thing is, held the appeals court panel, the 1968 law, as viewed through the lens of the Bruen ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court, doesn’t square with the historical right to bear arms and tossed the conviction.
“In short, our history and tradition may support some limits on an intoxicated person’s right to carry a weapon, but it does not justify disarming a sober citizen based exclusively on his past drug usage,” said U.S. Chief Judge Jerry Edwin Smith, a 1987 Reagan appointee, in the court’s opinion. “Nor do more generalized traditions of disarming dangerous persons support this restriction on nonviolent drug users. As applied to Daniels, then, § 922(g)(3) violates the Second Amendment. We reverse the judgment of conviction and render a dismissal of the indictment.”
American Buddhist Net 