I like to think I’m up to speed on most Second Amendment-related lawsuits, so I was surprised to run across a headline from a Jacksonville TV station today proclaiming “Court rules Florida medical marijuana patients can own guns.” I knew the Eleventh Circuit had issued a decision this week re-instating a lawsuit brought by several medical marijuana users who want to be able to lawfully possess a firearm (as well as a gun owner who wants to use medical marijuana without having to give up his guns), but I wasn’t aware of any ruling that explicitly stated what the station reported.
A federal judge has ruled Thursday that the government cannot prevent medical marijuana patients from owning guns, citing a violation of the Second Amendment.
The ruling came after the government failed to prove that medical marijuana users would pose a danger to themselves or others if allowed to own firearms.
WOKV-TV didn’t include any link to the judge’s opinion, or even name the case that led to the decision, but I haven’t seen any other decision other than the Eleventh Circuit’s allowing Florida Commissioner of Agriculture v. Attorney General of the United States to move forward after the case was dismissed by a federal judge back in 2022, so that must be the case that the station is talking about… which means the station got it wrong.
First off, it wasn’t a federal judge that issued the ruling on Thursday. It was a three-judge panel of the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals. And as we reported, while the panel determined that the judge had erred when dismissing the lawsuit for failure to state a claim, the appellate court did not determine that the federal prohibition on gun possession for “unlawful” users of drugs violates the Second Amendment.
The panel did conclude that the federal government had failed to demonstrate that the statute in question comports with the national tradition of gun ownership, which certainly opens the door to the courts siding with the plaintiffs. But this is an as-applied challenge, so it’s highly unlikely that the district court judge who’ll once again be in charge of the case would toss out Section 922(g)(3) entirely. I certainly hope the district court will conclude that the Second Amendment rights of the named plaintiffs were violated by the federal statute, but to date neither the district court nor the Eleventh Circuit has ruled “that the government cannot prevent medical marijuana patients from owning guns.”
This isn’t a case of media bias on the part of WOKV-TV. It’s just bad reporting. So bad, in fact, that it could lead to viewers accidentally breaking federal law because they trusted what they heard on the local news.
The Eleventh Circuit said that the lawsuit was improperly dismissed and re-instated the litigation. That is a victory, but it’s winning the battle, not the war. The plaintiffs can now continue to make their case that Section 922(g)(3) violates their Second Amendment rights, but as the appellate panel noted in its decision:
The Federal Government very well may prove at a later stage of litigation, after development of a factual record, that Appellants can fairly be considered relevantly similar to felons or dangerous individuals who can categorically be disarmed. Indeed, as Appellants concede on appeal (but, as discussed, not in the FAC), they may be fairly deemed as dangerous during the times they are high and thus have limitations placed on their right to use firearms while in such a mental state. See Rahimi, 602 U.S. at 691 (“At the founding, the bearing of arms was subject to regulations ranging from rules about firearm storage to restrictions on gun use by drunken New Year’s Eve revelers.”). But at the current stage of litigation, it cannot be determined whether they use marijuana to such an extent that it has a continuous effect on their psychological and physical well-being.
It doesn’t help that NORML (the National Organization for Reform of Marijuana Laws) also blatantly misrepresented this decision its own press release, which has been republished online by at least one Florida media outlet. NORML claims that “Patients who possess medical cannabis in compliance with state laws are free to exercise their 2nd Amendment rights to own a firearm, according to a ruling by judges on the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.”
Again, that’s not what the Eleventh Circuit said, though I hope we will eventually see a statement to that effect by the Eleventh Circuit. For now, though, the federal law barring “unlawful” users of drugs, even those who possess a medical marijuana license issued by the state of Florida, remains fully in effect in the Sunshine State, and both gun owners and marijuana users need to be aware of that fact.
Editor’s Note: It’s essential to get Second Amendment news from folks who have expertise in this subject.
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