Category: Courts

Another way to look at it.

Cheer Up! The Birthright Citizenship Case Moves Us Toward Inevitable Victory.

Would I have loved Justice Barrett or Chief Justice Roberts to have defied their natural judicial conservatism—in the non-political sense—and embraced the new thinking today? Yeah, that would’ve been great, but it wasn’t in the cards. Instead, we got two votes that I frankly didn’t expect. And those two votes position us for victory. If one of those five majority justices goes away and President Donald Trump appoints the replacement, it’s very likely we will have a 6–3 majority that supports limiting the current idea of effectively unlimited birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment.

Let me put it in sportsball terms. We didn’t score a touchdown today, but we moved the ball down the field and put ourselves in position for a field goal or maybe even a touchdown in the next couple of plays.

So don’t freak out, don’t cry, don’t scream and yell. There’s no reason to. This result was better than we had any right to expect at this juncture in the process of changing the way the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause is viewed under the law. And this is why keeping the Senate in 2026 is more important than ever.

Cheer up. Don’t doom. We did better than we had any right to expect, and in the end we’re going to win.

Supreme Court upholds birthright citizenship, rejecting Trump’s proposed limits

WASHINGTON (AP) — A divided Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld a broad conception of birthright citizenship, rejecting President Donald Trump’s executive order declaring that children born to people who are in the United States illegally or temporarily are not American citizens.

By a 6-3 vote, the court struck down Trump’s order. A bare majority of five justices, in an opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts, held that the long-settled understanding of the 14th Amendment, adopted after the Civil War, makes a citizen of anyone born in the country, with very limited exceptions,

“Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights—to freely participate in our political community. The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land,’” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court, citing congressional debate over the amendment, “We keep that promise today.”

A sixth justice, Brett Kavanaugh, disagreed about the constitutional ruling, but pointed to a federal law that he said broadly conveys birthright citizenship.

Supreme Court takes up challenges to AR-15 bans

Washington — The Supreme Court on Tuesday said it will consider whether the Second Amendment guarantees the right to have AR-15-style rifles.

In a brief order, the high court agreed to take up a pair of cases challenging local and state laws outlawing AR-15s and similar semi-automatic rifles. One involves an ordinance in Cook County, Illinois, and the other centers on Connecticut’s law.

The justices will hear arguments in the cases in its next term, which begins in October.

The cases are the first in which the high court will weigh the legality of laws restricting access to certain types of firearms. In a landmark 2022 decision, the Supreme Court recognized for the first time that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to carry a gun in public for self defense. But the justices had — until now — declined to take up challenges involving bans on AR-15s and similar semiautomatic rifles in Illinois and Maryland, leaving the laws in place.

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Supreme Court’s Wolford Decision Could Blow A Hole In New Jersey’s AR-15 Ban Defense

The Supreme Court’s decision in Wolford v. Lopez was about Hawaii’s attempt to turn most private property open to the public into gun-free zones by default. But the ruling may have just handed gun owners in New Jersey a powerful new weapon in the fight against the state’s ban on so-called “assault firearms.”

On June 26, attorneys for the Cheeseman plaintiffs in Association of New Jersey Rifle and Pistol Clubs v. Attorney General notified the Third Circuit that Wolford directly affects the pending challenge to New Jersey’s semiautomatic firearm ban.

Their point is simple: New Jersey cannot force gun owners to prove at the starting line that banned firearms are “in common use” before the Second Amendment even applies. Under Wolford, the first question is much more basic.

Does the law regulate “Arms”? If yes, the Constitution is already in play.

 

Wolford Reaffirms The Plain Text Test

Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the Court in Wolford, explained that Bruen’s first step asks whether the law falls within the Second Amendment’s plain text. That includes whether the law concerns “Arms,” meaning weapons “customarily used for offensive or defensive purposes,” according to the Court.

Phrasing matters. The Second Amendment does not protect only whatever gun a state lawyer is willing to admit is useful for home defense. It does not protect only handguns. It does not protect only muskets. It protects “Arms.” And Wolford confirms that the category includes weapons customarily used for offensive or defensive purposes. That is a problem for New Jersey.

That matters in Cheeseman because New Jersey’s ban plainly regulates firearms. Not accessories. Not conduct divorced from arms. Firearms.

The Cheeseman letter seizes on that language, telling the Third Circuit that “the only predicate question” is whether the law concerns “Arms.” The plaintiffs argue that the answer is “beyond dispute,” meaning the Second Amendment presumptively protects possession of the banned firearms. From there, the burden shifts to New Jersey.

That is the part anti-gun states hate. They want gun owners trapped in a never-ending preliminary debate over whether AR-15s, modern semiautomatic rifles, and similar arms are common enough, useful enough, or favored enough by judges to count. Wolford makes that harder.

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Why Black Codes Shouldn’t Be Viewed as Legal Precedent

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson took an interesting position in her Wolford dissent. In it, she actually argued that measures enacted prior to the 14th Amendment, which were meant to disarm black Americans following the Civil War, should be viewed as constitutional, if for no other reason than they didn’t explicitly say they just applied to black people.

But the thing is, we all know what they were about.

Cam hit on that on Thursday shortly after the decision came down.

Over at The National Review, Dan McLaughlin also had thoughts about the inane commentary from Jackson.

Jackson writes this as if she is completely oblivious to both the cause-and-effect relationship between the Black Codes and the enactment of the 14th Amendment and the fact that states could violate the Second Amendment with impunity before 1868 because until then it only bound the federal government. (Of course, nearly all such states had their own state constitutional guarantees, but Jackson just blows past the distinction.)

The 14th Amendment problem with these laws is not just that they would be struck down as racially discriminatory; it’s that even race-neutral laws that aimed to restrict the rights of freed black Southerners were a big reason the Republican Congress went beyond banning race discrimination and included within Section 1 of the 14th Amendment much broader guarantees against states stripping their citizens of rights. In 1865, Louisiana could ban guns or speech without violating federal law; in 1868, it could not.

Also, the fact that the laws were discriminatory in intent, often discriminatory on their face, regionally particular, broke with how white men were regulated across the country, and flew in the face of prior practice, are certainly all reasons to consider them a poor representative of an established, nationwide tradition. (Jackson cites the opinions of Daniel Sickles, but Sickles’ views of gun rights were hardly consistent, given that he shot the U.S. attorney for D.C. to death in the street for sleeping with his wife.)

The race discrimination isn’t merely an embarrassing footnote; it’s in many cases a sign that laws were being imposed on the minority that the majority would not have tolerated and did not tolerate in states without large populations of newly freed slaves. In the case of the 1865 Louisiana law cited by Katyal, it should be noted that putting the burden of applying the law on the decision of a private actor (the property owner) was fairly clearly a way of ensuring that it could be applied in discriminatory fashion.

It would be a different story if these were widely adopted laws that were also used by racists for racist reasons. There are many such cases. But the Black Codes were such a prominent part of Hawaii’s argument here because there were so few other straws to grasp.

And let’s be real here, while Jackson seems to think that because they weren’t explicitly racist, and because they weren’t overturned at the time by the courts of the era, they’re somehow an acceptable analog that should be used.

However, the whole idea of historic analogs from Bruen wasn’t about looking for the laws that might have prompted the 14th Amendment–one of the two eras Bruen tells judges to look at for analogs–but that were considered constitutional afterward.

To my knowledge, there were no cases that expressly upheld the law prohibiting carrying a firearm on plantation property without permission following the ratification of the 14th Amendment.

McLaughlin quotes Justice Amy Coney Barrett, “But even if Hawaii is right that the how is analogous, it also must identify an analogous why. The Black Codes were enacted to subordinate newly freed slaves. Hawaii obviously does not contend that its law promotes an analogous interest. So it’s law, and the default rules in the Black Codes are not relevantly similar.” She also notes that most would be happy to know that their law isn’t considered racist, unlike the Black Codes.

The important distinction here is that the Black Codes, particularly this one, were purely about disarming black Americans. They were racist on the surface and were only about empowering racism. In that way, they were no different than poll taxes and land ownership requirements for voting registration. They were created explicitly to limit the rights of freed slaves who were, at this time, American citizens.

When the only measures you can find that justify your preferred policies are inherently racist, most of us would take a step back and wonder exactly what the hell we’re doing with ourselves. Hawaii, and anti-gunners as a group, have no such self-awareness. They simply push the idea that laws which were unconstitutional because of how they targeted particular people at the time, as if that shouldn’t matter.

I honestly don’t see how either Hawaii’s attorneys or these two justices were able to look at themselves in the mirror for believing such blatantly racist measures were totally fine precedents for curtailing the rights of others.

It’s like looking at Ted Bundy as a role model for how to talk to girls.

Good! As it should be!

Legal experts warn that creating new gun control laws just got harder

WASHINGTON >> The Supreme Court in a pair of new rulings has further expanded the Constitution’s Second Amendment right “to keep and bear arms,” as the justices consider whether to take up additional gun rights cases for their next term.

The court, in a 6-3 ruling on Thursday, powered by its conservative majority, struck down a Hawaii law that required gun owners to get an owner’s permission before bringing a handgun onto private property open to the public, such as most businesses.

The justices decided unanimously last week to limit the application of a decades-old federal law that bars firearms possession by certain drug users, narrowing a measure that had threatened the gun rights of millions of Americans who use marijuana and own firearms.

In a nation deeply divided over how to address persistent firearms violence, including frequent mass shootings, these rulings underscored the court’s generally sympathetic approach toward protections enshrined in the Second Amendment.

The decisions, experts said, stiffened an already stringent legal test that gun control measures must clear in order to survive scrutiny under the amendment, ratified in 1791, that states, “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

Pepperdine University Caruso School of Law professor Jacob Charles said, “The two cases confirm the court’s extreme skepticism about all manner of gun regulations, especially new ones.”

“It has created and elaborated a test that makes it exceedingly difficult for legislatures to create gun laws to protect their citizens,” Charles said of the court.

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The Supreme Court lets the Trump administration end legal protections for Haitians and Syrians

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Thursday allowed the Trump administration to end legal protections for migrants fleeing violence and natural disaster in Haiti and Syria, exposing hundreds of thousands more people to potential deportation.

The 6-3 decision overturns lower court orders and allows the Department of Homeland Security to swiftly end temporary protected status, a program that protects a total of 1.3 million people from 17 countries.

It marked another victory at the high court for Republican President Donald Trump’s sweeping crackdown on immigration. Though the conservative-dominated court has put the brakes on some of Trump’s immigration policies, it handed him a second win Thursday in a decision clearing the way for the revival of a policy restricting immigrants seeking asylum.

The court’s conservative majority found that the law doesn’t allow courts to question the process that immigration authorities use to revoke the protections.

Supreme Court strikes down blue state’s ‘vampire rule’ in major win for gun rights

Justice Samuel Alito wrote that the law ‘violates the constitutional right to keep and bear arms’

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled against Hawaii on Thursday, handing concealed-carry permit holders a major victory in a 6-3 decision.

The Supreme Court sided with the plaintiff in Wolford v. Lopez, who contested Hawaii’s state law requiring a property owner’s explicit permission to allow lawful gun owners to bring firearms into public businesses.

“Hawaii’s law at issue here violates the constitutional right to keep and bear arms,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote. “This regime hobbles what the Second Amendment protects: the right of Americans to carry arms for self-defense as they go about their daily lives.”

The ruling reverses a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which had upheld Hawaii’s restrictions after the state enacted them in response to the Supreme Court’s 2022 Bruen decision.

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FPC Moves Forward in Lawsuit to Strike Down National Firearms Act

A reply brief in support of the plaintiffs’ motion for summary judgment was filed in Roberts v. ATF, an FPC-backed challenge to the National Firearms Act of 1934.

Plaintiffs in the case include T.J. Roberts, Zachary Cockrell, Meridian Ordnance, Buckeye Firearms Association, Center for Human Liberty, Jews for the Preservation of Firearm Ownership, and American Suppressor Association Foundation. The plaintiffs are represented by David Thompson, Peter Patterson, and Nicholas Varone of Cooper & Kirk.

The brief was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky, in Covington.

The brief was filed on June 24, 2026.

The brief responds to the Trump DOJ’s defense of the NFA and explains why the plaintiffs should win on summary judgment. The NFA’s registration scheme can no longer be justified under Congress’s taxing power because the taxes it was designed to help collect no longer exist; even if it could, the scheme still violates the Second Amendment by infringing upon the right to keep and bear suppressors and short-barreled rifles.

“The National Firearms Act is a relic of a darker era and an authoritarian scheme without a constitutional foundation. The federal government cannot use a dead tax scheme as an excuse to maintain a registry and regulatory regime for constitutionally protected arms, period. Our Constitution does not allow the government to put fundamental rights behind a paywall designed to make the instruments of liberty expensive and less accessible to the very people who have a right to them. As we approach our nation’s 250th birthday, the Trump Administration should be ashamed for defending an immoral tax-and-control scheme that only King George III would be proud of. FPC and our Grassroots Army will continue Fighting Forward to strike down this unconstitutional gun control regime.” — FPC President Brandon Combs

About Firearms Policy Coalition: Firearms Policy Coalition (FPC) is a nonprofit membership organization that exists to create a world of maximal individual liberty and eliminate unconstitutional gun control laws. FPC works—and wins—for the People through high-impact strategic litigation, groundbreaking research, legislative and regulatory advocacy, grassroots activism, education, and public engagement. FPC’s legal division, FPC Law, is the nation’s leading initiative dedicated to restoring the right to keep and bear arms across the United States. To learn more about how FPC is working—and winning—for the People, sign up for FPC news alerts at firearmspolicy.org and follow FPC on X, Instagram, and Facebook.

BLUF:
The Court’s reading of the Commerce Clause since Wickard has had wide-ranging consequences for Americans’ liberty and the powers the Constitution reserves to the states. Much federal overreach is accomplished in the name of this Clause, a provision that virtually no one, not even the Antifederalists, objected to at the time of the ratification debates. It’s well past time for the Court to reassert the Clause’s original meaning. Justice Thomas is leading the way.

Twenty-One Years Later, Justice Thomas Is Still Right About the Commerce Clause.

Marijuana stinks, enervates malaise into America’s youth, and even has a tendency to induce panic attacks. But let it not be said that marijuana has no benefits. After all, thanks to marijuana, or more accurately, Congress’s regulation of it, Justice Clarence Thomas has written opinions reminding Americans, and his fellow Justices, that Congress’s powers are not unlimited.

In a recently decided Supreme Court case called United States v. Hemani, the Court reversed a conviction of a man who had been prosecuted under a federal statute that prohibits anyone who uses a controlled substance from owning a firearm. The government prosecuted Ali Hemani under the statute because, while owning a firearm, he used marijuana.

The majority opinion in Hemani asked whether Hemani’s prosecution violated his Second Amendment rights and found that it did. Justice Thomas agreed with that conclusion but wrote a separate concurring opinion in which he asked the more fundamental question: Did Congress have the authority to pass this law in the first place?

The Constitution vests in Congress certain powers, and Congress has no power not vested in it by the Constitution. When Congress passes a law, it must be able to point to a specific power enumerated in the Constitution that allows it to do so. When a representative introduces a bill, he must point to the specific section of the Constitution that permits him to do so, called a Constitutional Authority Statement. Although the Bill of Rights, including the Second Amendment, does place further limits on those congressional powers, the Bill of Rights is irrelevant where Congress lacks the power to pass a law in the first place.

As Justice Thomas’s concurring opinion explains, Congress likely lacked authority to pass the law at issue in the Hemani case.

The Commerce Clause empowers Congress to “regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes.” As scholarship has made clear, and as Advancing American Freedom has argued several times in amicus briefs, at the time of the founding, the word “commerce” simply meant the trade of goods and “among the several states” meant — well — among the several states.

In other words, the Commerce Clause allows Congress, as Justice Thomas put it, “to regulate the buying and selling of goods and services trafficked across state lines.” By the time Hemani owned his firearm, it was no longer in interstate commerce — it was not being bought or sold across state lines. As such, Congress had no power to regulate it under the Commerce Clause.

Nor is this the first time Justice Thomas has had an opportunity to remind Americans about the Commerce Clause in a case involving marijuana. In a 2005 case called Gonzales v. Raich, federal officials, acting under a statute enacted by Congress supposedly under its Commerce Clause power, seized marijuana plants that individuals were growing in their backyards for personal medical use.

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Justice Thomas Questions Congress’s Power to Regulate Gun Possession Across State Lines
U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas answers questions during a visit to t

AP Photo/Eric Gay

In a concurring opinion for Hemani, Justice Clarence Thomas focused on another aspect of the federal statute on which the case centered and suggested Congress lacks the power to regulate gun possession across state lines.

Breitbart News reported the Supreme Court of the United States handed down the Hemani decision on Thursday, June 18, 2026. All nine justices stood against federal statute §922(g)(3), the statute under which Ali Hemani was arrested and prosecuted as “unlawful user” of marijuana in possession of a gun.

Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote SCOTUS’s majority opinion and Thomas wrote a concurring opinion, looking at another aspect of §922(g)(3) wherein he believes Congress exceeds its authority.

Thomas opened his opinion: “I agree with the Court that §922(g)(3) violates the Second Amendment as applied to respondent Ali Hemani, and I join its opinion in full. I write separately to call attention to another issue: As a matter of both original meaning and this Court’s precedents, §922(g)(3) appears to exceed Congress’s enumerated power to regulate interstate commerce.”

He narrowed his focus to Section 922(g), writing that it “appears to exceed Congress’s powers under the Commerce Clause.”

Thomas continued: “Congress has the power to “regulate Commerce . . . among the several States.”

However, he added, “As a matter of both original meaning and this Court’s precedents, Congress lacks the power to regulate the possession of firearms solely on the ground that they crossed state lines at some point in the past.”

Thomas opined, “Because §922(g) criminalizes possession of firearms apart from any purchase or sale of goods and services across state lines, I doubt that it could be an exercise of Congress’s Commerce Clause powers as an original matter.”

Although he stressed that this was not an issue in the Hemani case, he encouraged SCOTUS “and lower courts” to “revisit the constitutionality” of Congress regulation of firearm possession across state lines.

Well, from the responses by other Justices to her an Sotomayor’s dissents in other cases, it’s pretty clear both of them are stupid, agenda driven hacks who, like all other leftists, don’t like the idea of their political rivals having the means to make telling them “No” a real decisive statement.

Jackson’s Concurring Opinion in Hemani Case Makes Laughable Argument Against Bruen

The Supreme Court decision in NYSRPA v. Bruen is probably the most important ruling the Court has made on the Second Amendment in history. While Heller and McDonald are critical as well, the Bruen test is a simple, straightforward test that can and should be easily applied to gun control laws. Did something like that exist at the time of the nation’s founding? Was there something like it during the time of incorporation? No, then knock it off.

But while the Hemani decision was ultimately unanimous, Justice Kentaji Brown Jackson wrote a concurring opinion, along with Justice Sonya Sotomayor, arguing that the Bruen decision needs to be revisited.

Along with Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Jackson is advising the court to review its 2022 ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen.

Jackson and Sotomayor said the 2022 decision is “unworkable” and that the court may need to “retire the failed Bruen experiment.” That test, according to Jackson, is based on centuries-old evidence that may not be relevant to today’s legal questions.

“It imposes on judges the unfamiliar and difficult tasks of sifting through centuries-old evidence in order to answer ‘contested historical questions,’ and ‘applying those answers to resolve contemporary problems,’” Jackson said in her opinion, per Law & Crime.

“Given those challenges, it is unsurprising that Bruen’s test is vulnerable to inconsistent and arbitrary application, as judges draw different conclusions from the same historical evidence and reach divergent assessments of the same laws.”

I find it interesting that Jackson and Sotomayor seem to think that applying history to whether something would align with the Founding Fathers’ intentions is problematic for “contemporary problems.” Never mind that we still look at their intentions on, say, the Fourth Amendment as it relates to your cell phone data or what’s on your laptop. The historic norms were that your person and your property were largely off limits without a warrant. While frisking was one thing–the things in your pocket, for example–it was easy for the Court to decide that your cell phone was a different thing.

Why is it that guns are a different matter? Is it because the history doesn’t align with what these two justices really wanted?

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Two Federal Courts, Two Weeks Apart, Split on Whether Silencers Are Protected Arms

Key Takeaways

  • The Fifth Circuit ruled that silencers qualify as ‘arms’ protected by the Second Amendment, while the Ninth Circuit disagreed.
  • This split creates a significant circuit disagreement, potentially beneficial for suppressor owners.
  • The Fifth Circuit emphasized that if a device aids self-defense, it qualifies as an arm, while the Ninth Circuit viewed silencers as optional accessories.
  • Both cases upheld convictions due to non-ideal test circumstances, illustrating the complexities of the registration process.
  • The split may encourage the Supreme Court to address the definition of suppressors and their status under the Second Amendment.

NEW ORLEANS, LA — Two federal appeals courts just looked at the same question weeks apart and gave opposite answers. The question was simple. Is a silencer an “arm” the Second Amendment protects?

On June 18, the Fifth Circuit said yes. On June 3, the Ninth Circuit said no. That disagreement is now a real circuit split, and it may be the best thing to happen to suppressor owners in years.

I covered the Ninth Circuit loss earlier this month in United States v. DeBorba. Now the Fifth Circuit has answered back.

Start with the win. In United States v. Comeaux, a three-judge Fifth Circuit panel ruled that silencers are protected “Arms.” Brennan James Comeaux had been convicted of possessing an unregistered silencer under the National Firearms Act after deputies searched his home and he admitted making the devices. He challenged the charge on Second Amendment grounds.

Earlier rulings had ducked the core question, assuming silencers might be arms without deciding it. Judge Jerry E. Smith decided it. “They are,” he wrote.

His reasoning tracks the Constitution. Silencers cut noise and recoil, reduce muzzle blast, and improve accuracy and follow-up shots. Those functions make a gun safer and more effective for lawful self-defense. Because a silencer facilitates armed self-defense, it falls within the plain text of the Second Amendment. The government’s argument that a silencer is not necessary to fire a gun did not move the court. Under Bruen, an arm does not have to be necessary. It only has to facilitate self-defense.

Now compare that to the Ninth Circuit. In DeBorba, the same kind of NFA charge produced the opposite holding. That panel called silencers “optional accessories,” lumped them in with slings and scopes, and ruled they are not arms because a gun fires without one. Same statute, same Supreme Court precedent, completely different result.

This is the heart of the split. The Fifth Circuit asks whether a device facilitates self-defense. The Ninth Circuit asks whether a device is strictly necessary to make a gun go bang. One test protects the modern tools gun owners actually use. The other lets a court carve away any feature it decides is optional, and there is no obvious stopping point once scopes and sights are on the table.

Here is the frustrating part the two cases share. Both men still lost, and both courts leaned on the same crutch to get there.

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BREAKING: 5th Circuit Rules Suppressors Protected by Second Amendment

LOUISIANA — On Thursday, June 18, 2026, the 5th Circuit for the Western District of Louisiana ruled suppressors are bearable arms protected by the Second Amendment. This historic ruling means no state in the Fifth Circuit can ban suppressors, and we’re one step closer to the Supreme Court reaching the same conclusion.

The court ruling states, “Peterson left open the question whether silencers are Second Amendment ‘Arms.’. 161 F.4th at 339. They are. Under the Second Amendment, “Arms” comprises “weapons of offence,” “armour of defence,” and “anything that a man wears for his defence, . . . takes into his hands, or useth in wrath to cast at or strike another.” Heller, 554 U.S. at 581 (citation modified). To “bear arms,” in sum, means to “wear, bear, or carry . . . for the purpose . . . of being armed and ready for offensive or defensive action in case of conflict with another person.” Id. at 584 (ellipses in original). Silencers fit that definition.”

Ruling

The Right to Fight Back: Colorado Supreme Court Rules Private Employers Can’t Fire Workers for Self-Defense

The Brief:

The Colorado Supreme Court ruled that private employers cannot terminate at-will employees for exercising their right to self-defense against imminent bodily harm. This decision, arising from a convenience store incident, establishes that corporate policies cannot override an individual’s fundamental legal privilege to protect their own life while working.

This ruling creates a specific public policy exception to at-will employment. While businesses can still enforce protocols against escalating non-violent thefts, they are prohibited from firing workers for lawful and necessary self-defense. This shifts the legal balance between corporate liability policies and individual safety rights.

DENVER, CO — A legal battlefield that has spent six years winding through the federal and state court systems has culminated in a massive paradigm shift for worker safety and the Second Amendment community.

Writing for the 5-2 majority, State Supreme Court Justice Maria E. Berkenkotter dismantled the long-standing corporate assumption that at-will employment agreements allow businesses to force complete submission from employees facing violent workplace crimes.

“The employment relationship should not be used to strip workers of the ordinary legal privileges every person possesses,” Berkenkotter declared in the historic June 15 opinion. “The right to self-defense has never been cabined by role or location… Rather, the right follows the employee from home to work and back and everywhere in between.”

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Breaking: SCOTUS Says Prosecution of Gun Owner for Marijuana Use ‘Inconsistent’ With Second Amendment

The Supreme Court’s decision in U.S. v. Hemani was the first opinion released on Thursday morning, and the Court essentially delivered a unanimous victory for Ali Danial Hemani, who was charged with possessing a firearm as an unlawful user of drugs.

The majority opinion, authored by Justice Neil Gorsuch, found that the government failed to justify Section 922(g)(3) as it applies to Mr. Hemani, with the DOJ’s case suffering several major defects.

The government construes §922(g)(3) to automatically ban an individual from possessing a gun from the moment he becomes an unlawful user of any controlled substance and remains in effect until he ceases being one, regardless of what controlled substance an individual uses, in what amounts, whether his drug use has ever made him a danger to himself or others, why he keeps a gun, or how safely he does so.

The government analogizes its construction of §922(g)(3) to what it calls “habitual drunkard” laws, which it submits enjoy deep roots in the country’s history and are “relevantly similar” to the regulation it wishes to enforce.

These habitual drunkard laws fall into three general categories: vagrancy laws that allowed habitual drunkards to be confined in workhouses or jailed; civil-commitment statutes that allowed courts to appoint guardians for habitual drunkards or authorized their commitment to asylums; and surety laws under which judicial officers could compel habitual drunkards to post surety bonds to ensure their good behavior.

The government’s analogy fails on every metric it invites the Court to consider. Taken cumulatively, these problems prove fatal to the government’s prosecution of Mr. Hemani.

Gorsuch and the other justices concluded that the habitual drunkard laws are not analogous to the modern prohibition on gun possession by unlawful drug users, for several reasons; “drunkards” are not the same as every kind of drug user, the civil commitment and vagrancy laws were generally designed to protect drunkards from themselves and not the public from drunkards, and “the way habitual drunkard statutes worked in the past differs significantly from how §922(g)(3)’s unlawful user provision works today.”

There are reasons to doubt that the government has established §922(g)(3) even serves the purpose the government claims, of disarming categorically violent and unusually dangerous persons.

Section 922(g)(3)’s reliance on the Controlled Substances Act—a statute adopted to protect “the health and general welfare of the American people,” 21 U. S. C. §801(2), and under which drugs can be added to schedules for reasons having little or nothing to do with their potential to induce violence—makes it far from obvious that 18 U. S. C.§922(g)(3) confines its reach to those who are categorically and unusually dangerous.

Additionally, the government’s own regulatory actions undercut its position: the Department of Justice has directed federal prosecutors to curtail enforcement efforts against marijuana users, most States have legalized marijuana use to some degree, and the government recently moved some marijuana products from Schedule I to Schedule III, 91 Fed. Reg. 22714.

Affording the government “broad power to designate any group as dangerous and thereby disqualify its members from having a gun” would risk allowing it to “quickly swallow” the Second Amendment.

Gorsuch notes, however, that today’s decision is a narrow one, and that it does not address efforts “to ban addicts or those presently intoxicated from possessing a firearm,” and “other prophylactic laws Congress might adopt after determining that users of a particular drug pose a special risk of misusing firearms.

Section 922(g)(1)’s provision disarming individuals convicted of felonies is also left untouched by today’s opinion, as is the question about whether the government could bring a prosecution under §922(g)(3) “accompanied by individualized proof that the defendant’s drug use renders him a danger to himself or others, or proof that a certain drug always renders its users dangerous.”

Still, the decision isn’t so narrow as to only apply to Ali Hemani. As Gorsuch writes, marijuana use has become far more common than it was just a few decades ago, in part because the federal government has moved to stop prosecuting individuals for personal amounts of cannabis and more than half the country has legalized its use for medical or recreational purposes.

“Whatever one thinks of these developments, the federal government has not just tolerated them;it helped fuel them,” writes Gorsuch. “All of which leaves it awkwardly positioned to suggest that the millions of Americans who now regularly use marijuana are categorically and unusually dangerous.”

The government maintains that it may automatically strip Mr. Hemani of his Second Amendment right to possess a firearm because he uses marijuana a few times a week.

More than that, because he possessed a gun despite this prohibition, the government insists it may imprison him for up to 15 years and disarm him for life.

According to the government, none of this turns on how much marijuana Mr.Hemani uses or what effect it has on him. It makes no difference either if he keeps a firearm only in his home for self defense, never misuses a gun while intoxicated, and never poses a danger to himself or others as a result of his marijuana use.

The only thing the government must show, it says, is that an individual like Mr. Hemani regularly uses any amount of any controlled substance.

To square that expansive theory with the Second Amendment, the government invites us to draw an analogy between its present regulation and historical laws addressing habitual drunkards.

Those laws, the government contends, demonstrate a tradition of firearm regulation consistent with its effort to disarm any regular user of any controlled substance without any further showing.

But the government’s analogy fails under every measure it asks us to consider: The historical laws on which it relies targeted different kinds of people, did so for different reasons, and operated in different ways.

And faced with all these shortcomings in the government’s submission, we cannot say it has carried its conceded burden of showing its prosecution of Mr. Hemani complies with the Second Amendment. The judgment of the Fifth Circuit is affirmed.

Today’s decision doesn’t render Section 922(g(3) moot, but it does mean that individuals cannot lose their Second Amendment rights solely because they regularly use marijuana; a decision that will have an impact on millions of Americans, including those who have previously had to choose between possessing a medical marijuana card and possessing a firearm.

I’m not particularly shocked by the decision, but I am surprised that every justice agrees, even if a couple of them wrote separate concurrences instead of joining the majority opinion. I figured Alito and Roberts might not go along with the majority based on their questions during oral arguments, but Roberts joined the majority opinion and Alito wrote a concurrence in which he was joined by Justice Elena Kagan.

We’ll have more on those concurrences later today, but for now gun owners can celebrate a significant win for the right to keep and bear arms. We still have one more Second Amendment case waiting in the wings in Wolford v. Lopez, and that decision could be released as early as next Tuesday.

Gun Stores Slap Lawsuit On Jared Polis Over Warrantless Transaction Searches

An alliance of firearms dealers and Second Amendment advocates sued Democratic Colorado Gov. Jared Polis over a law authorizing warrantless searches of gun sales records.

Polis signed HB26-1126, which allows any “peace officer” to inspect the sales records of any gun store without a warrant at any time and for any reason, on June 2. The lawsuit filed by the Colorado Shooting Sports Association (CSSA), the Colorado Federal Firearms Licensees Association (CFFLA) on behalf of three federal firearms licensees (FFL) challenges the warrantless inspection provisions of the bill on Fourth Amendment grounds.

“The statute provides no notice of regularity, empowers an overbroad class of inspectors with no nexus to firearms regulation, imposes no temporal or frequency limitations, and places no restrictions on the manner of inspections,” the complaint says regarding the law, which takes effect on Jan. 1, 2027.

“The contrast with the federal firearms-inspection framework could not be starker,” the complaint continues. “Under 18 U.S.C. § 923(g), compliance inspections of federally licensed firearms dealers may be conducted only by the U.S. Attorney General’s designated agents (in practice, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives), only during business hours, and no more than once in any 12-month period, absent meeting narrow statutory exceptions.”

CSSA, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation, announced their lawsuit at a Friday event, noting the bill says gun dealers who do not cooperate face a misdemeanor charge.

“Criminals do not follow gun laws. They never have and never will,” CSSA Director of Operations Daniel Fenelson, who described himself as a “school shooting survivor,” said. “They steal firearms, obtain them on the black market and use other illegal means to obtain these weapons.”

“Not a single piece of gun control legislation passed through and by Bloomberg shill Tom Sullivan here in State Senate District 27 ever protected any Coloradans,” Fenelson continued.

Colorado is already being sued by the Second Amendment Section of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice over its ban on standard-capacity magazines holding more than 15 rounds. The DOJ also is challenging a ban on modern semiautomatic firearms imposed by the city of Denver.

Polis did not respond to a request for comment from the DCNF.