Federal judge rules that law barring marijuana users from owning guns is unconstitutional
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A judge in Oklahoma has found that a federal law banning marijuana users from possessing firearms is unconstitutional.
Federal Judge Patrick Wyrick dismissed a case against Jared Harrison, citing an expansion on gun rights by the US Supreme Court last year, Reuters first reported. Mr Wyrick said that the law barring marijuana users from owning weapons, which Mr Harrison was accused of violating, infringed his Second Amendment right to bear arms.
Court documents reviewed by The Independent showed that Mr Harrison was charged in August. His indictment stated that he was an “unlawful marijuana user” and that his firearm had crossed state lines to reach the state of Oklahoma.”
“The mere use of marijuana carries none of the characteristics that the nation’s history and tradition of firearms regulation supports,” Judge Wyrick wrote in the filing, adding that the use of marijuana is “not in and of itself a violent, forceful, or threatening act.”
Judge Wyrick, who was appointed by then-President Donald Trump, also noted that medical marijuana can be legally purchased in Oklahoma.
At the time of his encounter with police during a traffic stop, Mr Harrison told an officer that he was “on his way to work at a medical marijuana dispensary, but that he did not have a state-issued medical-marijuana card.”
He also told the officer that he was on probation in Texas for aggravated assault, according to court documents.
The prosecution had argued that Mr Harrison was not part of “the people” protected by the Second Amendment because “he is not ‘a law-abiding citizen.’”
“And even if it did, there is a historical tradition of preventing ‘presumptively risky’ people like felons and the mentally ill from possessing firearms, and for purposes of the Second Amendment, concludes the government, marijuana users are no different from those because they are similarly ‘unvirtuous,’” prosecutors stated in the court filings.
Mr Harrison’s public defender described the decision as a “step in the right direction for a large number of Americans who deserve the right to bear arms and protect their homes just like any other American.”
Last year, the Supreme Court voted a gun regulation unconstitutional, ruling that the Second Amendment protects a person’s right to carry in public for self-defence. Restrictions for gun owners must now be “consistent with this nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”
