Representational Image. AFP
Oklahoma: In the most recent weapons regulatory challenge since the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority set new standards for examining the nation’s gun laws, a federal judge in Oklahoma has declared that a federal law preventing persons who use marijuana from owning firearms is ‘unconstitutional’.
The defendant, in this case, Jared Michael Harrison was arrested after cops had found Marijuana and a loaded gun in his car in May 2022 as a result of a traffic stop.
His attorneys contended that a federal regulation that forbids “illegal users or addicts of controlled substances” from possessing firearms violated their client’s Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.
Harrison admitted to the police that he had been heading to a medicinal marijuana dispensary but that he lacked a state-issued marijuana card.
In a position similar to what the U.S. Supreme Court held last year in the case known as New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, his attorneys had argued that the portion of federal firearms law focused on drugusers or addicts was not consistent with the historical tradition of the nation’s gun regulation. New guidelines for interpreting the Second Amendment were created by that case.
The legal provision pertaining to drug users, according to federal prosecutors, is “compatible with a longstanding historical tradition in America of disarming presumptively hazardous persons, namely, felons, the mentally ill, and the drunk.”
Federal prosecutors’ claims that stripping Harrison of his fundamental right to own a firearm “is not a constitutionally permissible manner of disarming Harrison,” according to U.S. District Judge Patrick Wyrick in Oklahoma City, were rejected by the court on Friday.
Wyrick, who was appointed by former President Donald Trump, stated that the mere use of marijuana contains none of the features that the nation’s history and tradition of guns control support.
In his decision, Wyrick emphasised that more than 2,000 storefronts in Oklahoma are authorised by law to sell marijuana.
The decision was made just one day after a three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans declared that the government cannot prohibit those with domestic violence restraining orders from owning firearms.
In making its determination, the panel cited the Bruen judgement. Trump has appointed two of the panel’s three judges.
The Justice Department has said that it will ask for a second opinion on the appeals court’s ruling.
A federal judge in Midland, Texas, decided in September that a weapons statute that prohibits people who have been charged with felonies from purchasing firearms is unconstitutional.
There was “little evidence” that the ban connected to being under indictment “aligns with our Nation’s historical heritage,” said U.S. District Judge David Counts in that case, who is also a Trump appointment.
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