The Supreme Court announced on Monday that it would consider a Second Amendment challenge to the federal law barring drug users and addicts from having a gun, in a case testing the statute used to convict President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s son Hunter last year.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit found the law unconstitutional in most cases and said it could be applied only to those “presently impaired.” The Trump administration urged the justices to reverse the ruling, saying the law should be upheld because habitual drug users with firearms presented “unique dangers to society” and raised the prospect of “armed, hostile encounters with police officers.”
The case will require the justices to apply the court’s recently adopted test for examining challenges to gun control measures. Formulated in 2022, the test requires courts to strike down such laws unless they are “consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”
The Supreme Court has issued a series of major rulings favoring gun rights but limited the sweep of the 2022 decision when it found last year that the government could take guns away from people subject to restraining orders for domestic violence. In March, the justices also upheld federal restrictions on so-called ghost guns, the nearly untraceable, homemade firearms that can be easily assembled.
At issue in the new case is a section of federal law that bars any person who “is an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance” from possessing a firearm.
At least 32 states and territories have enacted similar laws restricting the possession of firearms by drug users and drug addicts.
Hunter Biden was convicted in June 2024 on felony gun charges after a jury found he had lied about his drug use when he filled out a form to purchase a gun and then illegally owned the firearm as a drug user. The charges stemmed from Mr. Biden’s purchase and possession of a handgun during a time when he later acknowledged he had been addicted to crack cocaine.
President Biden pardoned his son in December 2024, before he could be sentenced for the crime.
Challenges to the constitutionality of the law have divided the lower courts.
Justice Department lawyers said the statute was consistent with the nation’s history of gun regulation and what they said were harsher, founding-era restrictions on gun possession by “habitual drunkards.” The law, they said, was narrow because it allowed a person to regain access to firearms “simply by ceasing his habitual illegal drug use.”
The case before the justices began with Ali Danial Hemani, a dual citizen of the United States and Pakistan, whose actions caught the attention of the F.B.I. A search of his phone at a border crossing revealed that he was poised to commit fraud at the direction of suspected affiliates of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, court filings show.
During an F.B.I. search of his home, agents found a Glock 9-millimeter pistol, marijuana and cocaine. Mr. Hemani admitted to using marijuana about every other day and told the F.BI. that the cocaine, which had been found in his mother’s room, belonged to him. After his conviction on charges of illegally possessing the gun, Mr. Hemani won his appeal at the Fifth Circuit, and the Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to intervene.
Mr. Hemani’s lawyers told the justices that the government had mischaracterized his actions, and that there was no evidence that he was under the influence of drugs when law enforcement found the Glock.
His lawyers acknowledged that historical laws barred intoxicated people from carrying weapons but said those restrictions did not apply to regular drinkers. The Fifth Circuit said the federal law applied too broadly to ban all possession, even when a person was not under the influence of illegal drugs.
The courts of appeals have said that the word “user” in the statute means someone who engages in the habitual or regular use of a controlled substance.
But the Fifth Circuit concluded there was no historical justification for disarming a sober person who is not under the influence.
Ann Marimow covers the Supreme Court for The Times from Washington.
The post Supreme Court Will Weigh Gun Restrictions for Drug Users appeared first on New York Times.
