In the past few weeks, I’ve published a few posts (here and here) about recent federal cannabis gun rights cases. In those cases, the courts disagreed on whether the federal government can prohibit cannabis users from owning guns. On the other end of the spectrum, there are state-level efforts to protect gun rights for cannabis users. They aren’t going to work, and I’ll explain why below.
To set the stage a bit, current provisions of the federal Gun Control Act of 1968 deems cannabis users to be “prohibited persons” who may not legally own or possess firearms. Cannabis users have no gun rights even if they live in states that allow medical and/or recreational marijuana. These gun control laws are what have been at stake in the federal cases I described above. They are likely to be litigated in yet other federal court cases and – unless Congress finally does its job and legalizes cannabis – has a strong chance of making its way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
In the meantime, states are going to start doing what they’ve done since the late 90s – taking matters into their own hands. A good example of this is Missouri, which in
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