We’ve seen some absurd rulings on gun control recently, including the decision by a Trump-appointed judge in Kansas to dismiss machine gun charges based on the Second Amendment and Supreme Court precedent.
A new ruling from the U.S. 5th Court of Appeals, which has a history of issuing some strange rulings on a variety of subjects, including guns, shows that the Supreme Court’s gun jurisprudence, however illogical, can lead to a more sensible outcome.
That ruling came Wednesday in the federal case of Paola Connelly, described by the 5th Circuit panel as “a nonviolent, marijuana-smoking gun owner.” One of the laws she was accused of violating in Texas was 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(3), alleging possession of firearms and ammunition as an unlawful user of a controlled substance.
The panel of three judges summarised the facts as follows:
El Paso police responded to her home on a report of “shots fired.” When they arrived, they found Paola’s husband, John, standing at their neighbor’s door firing a shotgun. After arresting him, they spoke with Paola, who indicated that she sometimes smoked marijuana as a sleep aid and for anxiety. A search of the Connellys’ home revealed drug paraphernalia and several firearms, including Paola’s own. There was no indication that Paola was intoxicated at the time.
To determine whether her Second Amendment rights were violated, the panel had to decide, based on recent Supreme Court case law, whether the law “is consistent with our history and tradition of gun regulation.” The panel concluded that history and tradition “prevent some limitations on a currently The 5th Circuit upheld Connelly’s challenge as it applied specifically to her case (called an “as-applied” challenge), while rejecting her challenge to the law itself (called a “facial” challenge).
“Just as there is no historical justification for disarming a citizen of sound mind, there is no historical justification for disarming a sober citizen who is not under a restraining influence,” wrote Judge Kurt Engelhardt for the panel. The Trump-appointed judge was joined by Judges Jerry Smith and Irma Carrillo Ramirez, appointed by Reagan and Biden, respectively.
The government prosecutors had compared the drug use to historical restrictions for the mentally ill, but the appeals court rejected that comparison, reasoning that: “While she was intoxicated, be able to comparable to a seriously mentally ill person that the Founders would disarm. But while sober, she is like a repeat alcoholic between bouts of drunkenness, which the Founders would not disarm.”
The court also rejected the government’s appeal to the historic disarmament of “dangerous” people:
Marijuana users are not a class of political traitors, as English Loyalists were seen. Nor are they, like Catholics and other religious dissidents, seen as potential insurgents.
While this is true and at first glance seems to support a logical result, this observation highlights the absurdity of the analysis in these cases in modern times.
It’s an analysis that people like Hunter Biden want to use in his own case, after he was found guilty in June in federal court in Delaware on multiple counts, including the 922(g)(3) charge. Biden’s case is in a different appeals court, and it would take another Supreme Court ruling to set a national standard.
In the Supreme Court’s most recent Second Amendment ruling of the past term, United States v. Rahimi, the court upheld gun restrictions for people subject to trespassing orders. The ruling suggested that the court is unwilling to push the 2022 Bruen precedent, which laid out the historical analysis test, as far as it will go. The drug issue is one of many important questions raised by recent Supreme Court decisions, but as Rahimi showed, it’s up to the justices to address each specific issue as it comes to them.
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This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
