The Supreme Court ruled 9-0 on Thursday that the federal government cannot prosecute a regular marijuana user simply for possessing a firearm, handing pro-gun groups a clean victory in Hemani v. United States. But Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor could not resist using their concurring opinion to launch a broadside against the very framework that has powered Second Amendment wins since 2022, calling on the Court to overturn New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen.
The result is a case where even the liberal wing agreed the government overreached, yet two of its members spent their ink lobbying to dismantle the legal standard that makes such overreach easier to challenge in the first place.
Justice Neil Gorsuch authored the majority opinion striking down the prosecution of Ali Danial Hemani, a Texas man charged under 18 U.S.C. §922(g)(3), the federal statute barring "unlawful users" of controlled substances from possessing firearms. The same law was used to convict Hunter Biden in 2024 before his father pardoned him. Hemani had allegedly admitted to using marijuana multiple times a week while owning a legally purchased Glock 19.
The ruling itself is straightforward. Gorsuch, as the Washington Examiner reported, wrote that the government failed to show regular marijuana use automatically makes someone dangerous enough to forfeit a constitutional right.
As Gorsuch put it in the majority opinion:
"We do not question that sometimes an individual's unlawful use of marijuana may render him a danger to others. But the government asks us to conclude that anyone who regularly uses marijuana is categorically violent and dangerous without any further showing."
Six justices joined Gorsuch's opinion in full. Justices Samuel Alito and Elena Kagan concurred in the judgment only, meaning they agreed with the outcome but not necessarily every piece of the reasoning. The Court ruled narrowly, declining to decide whether laws barring addicts or people who are actively intoxicated from possessing firearms would survive constitutional scrutiny.
The political coalitions in this case were unusual from the start. During oral arguments earlier this year, the Trump administration's Justice Department defended the gun restriction, arguing habitual drug users with firearms pose unique dangers. The NRA, Gun Owners of America, and the ACLU all lined up on the other side, a rare alignment that AP News documented as one of the more unusual alliances in recent Supreme Court history.
The ACLU's national legal director, Cecillia Wang, said after the ruling that "with nearly half of Americans reporting marijuana use at some point in their lives, this ruling protects the rights of millions and curbs the government's ability to impose arbitrary and discriminatory penalties."
The Court's skepticism was bipartisan during oral arguments. Gorsuch pressed the government's attorney with a pointed hypothetical, asking what would happen if someone "took one gummy bear with a medical prescription in Colorado" to help him sleep every other day: "Disarm him for life?" Justice Amy Coney Barrett noted she didn't "see anything in the scheme that actually reflects Congress's judgment that this makes someone more dangerous," Fox News reported.
If the story ended there, it would be a clean win for constitutional rights and a rebuke of prosecutorial overreach. But Brown Jackson and Sotomayor chose to use their concurrence as a vehicle for something much larger: a direct challenge to the Bruen framework that has governed Second Amendment cases since June 2022.
In Bruen, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the majority that gun regulations must be consistent with the nation's historical tradition of firearms regulation, not merely pass a judge-made balancing test. That standard replaced the "means-end scrutiny" approach lower courts had applied since District of Columbia v. Heller was decided in 2008. Under means-end scrutiny, courts weighed the government's interest against the burden on gun rights, a framework that in practice gave the government enormous latitude.
Brown Jackson made no secret of her goal. She wrote that she was filing separately "to emphasize that means-end scrutiny, the approach courts applied before we adopted Bruen's 'history and tradition' metric, offers a more rational way of assessing the constitutionality of firearm regulations."
She added bluntly: "As I and others have elsewhere explained, Bruen is unworkable."
The concurrence then laid out what Brown Jackson described as a simpler framework for evaluating gun laws. She wrote:
"Applying means-end scrutiny to firearm restrictions like the 18 U.S.C. §922(g)(3) prosecution before us would be straightforward. We would be tasked with answering familiar questions: How severe is the law's burden on Second Amendment rights? Does the government have a strong interest in preventing firearm possession by those 'who pose a special danger of misuse'? And is §922(g)(3)'s ban on firearm possession by unlawful users of marijuana sufficiently tailored to that interest?"
Brown Jackson acknowledged that neither party had asked the Court to overturn Bruen, writing: "I opine only on the mechanics of the means-ends test; what result that test would produce here is not before us, since neither party asks us to overturn Bruen and apply means-ends scrutiny."
In other words, she used a case about marijuana and gun rights to write what amounts to a legal brief against the Court's own precedent, a precedent no one in the case had challenged.
Konstadinos Moros, director of legal research and education at the Second Amendment Foundation, did not hold back in responding to the concurrence. He told the Daily Caller News Foundation that Brown Jackson's characterization of Bruen as "unworkable" was the real inversion.
"The Jackson and Sotomayor concurrence complains that Bruen is 'unworkable' while calling for a return to a standard (means-end scrutiny) that was actually unworkable. As just one example, from when Heller was decided in 2008 until Bruen was decided in 2022, the Ninth Circuit did not strike down a single gun law even though it heard dozens of cases."
That record, fourteen years of Second Amendment litigation in one of the nation's largest federal circuits without a single law struck down, tells its own story about what "means-end scrutiny" meant in practice. The test that Brown Jackson calls "familiar" and "straightforward" produced a result in which the Second Amendment functioned as a dead letter in the courts covering California, Oregon, Washington, Hawaii, and several other states.
Moros was even more direct about the concurrence's real purpose, telling the DCNF: "It was a test that even more strongly favored the government and drifted massively from the original intent behind the adoption of the Second Amendment. Perhaps that's what Justice Jackson and Sotomayor would prefer, but it was not a 'workable' status quo for a meaningful Second Amendment."
On social media, Moros also flagged a notable absence from the concurrence. Justice Kagan, the third liberal on the Court, did not join Brown Jackson and Sotomayor's call to overturn Bruen. The significance of that choice remains unclear, but it suggests the anti-Bruen position could not even command a unified liberal bloc.
The Hemani ruling arrives as the Supreme Court nears the end of a busy term that has produced a string of consequential decisions. The Court is still expected to release its opinion in Wolford v. Lopez, another Second Amendment case challenging a Hawaii concealed-carry restriction, before the session concludes. Just The News reported that justices showed similar skepticism toward the government's position in that case during oral arguments, suggesting the term may close with another pro-gun-rights outcome.
The Court has also been active on other fronts this term, agreeing to hear new cases on jury size and intellectual disability in death sentences, and issuing a politically significant ruling allowing Alabama Republicans to redraw their congressional map.
Meanwhile, the broader composition of the Court itself remains a subject of close attention. With speculation about a possible Alito retirement swirling, the balance that produced Thursday's 9-0 ruling could shift, and the Brown Jackson, Sotomayor concurrence reads like a marker laid down for that eventuality.
That is the real takeaway from Hemani. The ruling itself is a victory for gun owners and for the principle that the government cannot strip a constitutional right based on a vague statutory category and no individualized showing of danger. But the concurrence reveals the long game. Two justices used a case they agreed with to argue for restoring a legal framework that, for fourteen years, allowed federal courts to rubber-stamp virtually every gun restriction that came before them.
They joined the unanimous result. Then they wrote a roadmap for undoing the standard that made it possible.
When someone wins a case and still complains about the rules, pay attention to the rules they want instead.