GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (AP) — Against the background hum of the convention center, Dar Leaf settled into a club chair to explain the sacred mission of America’s sheriffs, his bright blue eyes and warm smile belying the intensity of the cause.

“The sheriff is supposed to be protecting the public from evil,” the chief law enforcement officer for Barry County, Michigan, said during a break in the National Sheriffs’ Association 2023 conference in June. “When your government is evil or out of line, that’s what the sheriff is there for, protecting them from that.”

Leaf is on the advisory board of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, founded in 2011 by former Arizona sheriff Richard Mack. The group, known as CSPOA, teaches that elected sheriffs must “protect their citizens from the overreach of an out-of-control federal government” by refusing to enforce any law they deem unconstitutional or “unjust.”

…The sheriffs group has railed against gun control laws, COVID-19 mask mandates and public health restrictions, as well as alleged election fraud. It has also quietly spread its ideology across the country, seeking to become more mainstream in part by securing state approval for taxpayer-funded law enforcement training, the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism found.

Over the last five years, the group has hosted trainings, rallies, speeches and meetings in at least 30 states for law enforcement officers, political figures, private organizations and members of the public, according to the Howard Center’s seven-month probe, conducted in collaboration with the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting.

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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.”

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