The FBI came to Ali Hemani’s door not because he was a criminal. Agents suspected his family might have ties to terrorism. He cooperated. He handed over a firearm. He told federal investigators he smoked marijuana regularly.
That cooperation cost him. Federal prosecutors used his own words to charge him with a felony under a law that bans “habitual” drug users from owning guns. The terrorism investigation never produced charges. What it produced, instead, was a gun prosecution.
On Thursday, the Supreme Court said that prosecution was unconstitutional. All nine justices agreed.
The ruling in United States v. Hemani is the most consequential Second Amendment decision this term, and its reach extends far beyond one Texas man. The law at issue is 18 U.S.C. 922(g)(3). Gun owners know it. Defense attorneys know it. And most Americans have heard of it recently under a different lens: it’s the statute the federal government used to convict Hunter Biden.
Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the court, called the ruling “a narrow one.” It doesn’t hand firearms to addicts. It doesn’t touch the statute’s other subsections that bar felons, domestic abusers, and others from possessing guns. What it does is cut off a specific application of the law that the government had been stretching well past its constitutional limits.
The government’s historical defense didn’t hold up. The Justice Department pointed to early American laws targeting “habitual drunkards” as the founding-era foundation for the drug-user ban. Gorsuch rejected the comparison directly: those laws “targeted different people for different purposes and operated in different ways.”
Justice Samuel Alito wrote separately to sharpen the point. “Marijuana use today is like alcohol use at the founding,” he wrote in a concurring opinion.
That line lands directly in the framework the Supreme Court established in its 2022 Bruen decision. Under Bruen, gun regulations must be rooted in the historical tradition of firearm regulation. The government has to show the founders would have recognized what it’s doing. Nine justices concluded that stripping someone of their Second Amendment rights because they smoke marijuana doesn’t survive that test.
The Hemani case should unsettle people across the political spectrum. Here was a man who, by the government’s own account, cooperated with a federal terrorism investigation. No terrorism charges materialized. Instead, prosecutors reached for a gun charge built on his voluntary disclosure about marijuana. The Supreme Court found that move constitutionally indefensible.
Now about Hunter Biden.
The same statute, 922(g)(3), formed the basis of three felony counts when Biden went to trial in Delaware in June 2024. He was convicted. The prosecution rested on evidence that he had lied on a federal firearms form, claiming he wasn’t a drug user when he was, by his own admission in his memoir, deep in a crack cocaine addiction.
Before sentencing, President Joe Biden issued a sweeping pardon covering any federal crimes his son may have committed from 2014 through December 2024.
The Biden camp spent years arguing the prosecution was political. Some of that argument may have had merit as a political observation. But the irony cuts hard: the law his defenders said was weaponized against him was also, according to nine Supreme Court justices, too broad to hold up constitutionally in the first place. The law was flawed before it ever touched Hunter Biden. It took a marijuana-smoking Dallas resident, who never faced terrorism charges, to get the Court to say so.
The ruling will move fast through the legal system. Defense attorneys are already drafting motions for clients charged or convicted under 922(g)(3). The decision is narrow enough that not every prosecution falls apart on contact, but broad enough that cases involving marijuana users, as opposed to addicted users of harder drugs, will face serious challenge. Judges will sort through fact patterns case by case, and the circuit courts will be busy.
The bigger picture is what this ruling signals about the Court’s direction on the Second Amendment. Since Bruen, the justices have consistently required the government to do the historical homework it long avoided. Lower courts have struck down bans covering people under domestic restraining orders, people charged with nonviolent crimes, and others. The Hemani ruling adds marijuana users to that list, at minimum in the circumstances that produced this prosecution.
What the government cannot do, the Court has now said nine times over, is write a sweeping prohibition, assert a thin historical justification, and expect the Second Amendment to stand aside. That is a direct and deliberate message.
The law that took his gun won’t survive in its current form. And the law that convicted Hunter Biden just got a unanimous verdict from the Supreme Court of the United States: it was unconstitutional all along.
