Analysis by Kyle A. Lohmeier
In a move that should surprise no one, the Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals just re-wrote the intent of the constitution on Wednesday and stripped Second Amendment rights away from people who have a legal medical marijuana card; at least in the nine western states where the Ninth has jurisdiction.
The case arose after a Nevada woman, S. Rowan Wilson, was denied a firearm in 2011 for having a medical marijuana card. She said she obtained the card to show support for medical marijuana, but doesn’t use it herself. A lower court ruled that it is reasonable to suspect someone with a marijuana card uses marijuana and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that finding, adding that using marijuana “raises the risk of irrational or unpredictable behavior with which gun use should not be associated.”
This almost needs no further analysis. What can I add that isn’t already glaringly obvious? Yes, it’s asinine to assume using marijuana makes anyone more aggressive. Yes, this case begs the question as to what should be done with people who drink alcohol and own guns, since the connection between irrational violence and alcohol actually exists. Or, what about people prescribed other drugs with potential psychotropic properties; they don’t lose their Second Amendment rights without due process? Why just marijuana? And, yes, it’s idiotic to assume using any drug for any reason should short-circuit one’s Second Amendment rights.
“The 9th Circuit also rejected other constitutional challenges to the ban that were raised by Wilson, including her argument that her gun rights were being stripped without due process,” reads a portion of Sudhin Thanawala’s, Associated Press piece on the matter.
I wish a bit more detail had been provided there; it would be instructive to see what those “judges” mistook for due process.
As much as anything else, this boondoggle highlights the various problems attendant to insisting on having government. Government is, by nature, arbitrary and capricious; it’s also for sale to the highest bidder – which just answered all the above questions relating to alcohol and the products of big pharma. Marijuana has been illegal for decades, there is no lobby to represent the people who produce and sell it. The currently legal products marijuana competes against, namely alcohol, has massive numbers of lobbyists representing the various brewers, distillers and importers making money on the alcohol trade.
When there exists a government with sufficient power to be able to not only regulate what individuals put into their bodies, but to be able to violently enforce those laws with impunity; that competing interests will seek to harness that violent power for themselves for use against their competitors goes without saying. Why wouldn’t they? Thus, it’s not just public opinion and government recalcitrance that advocates for policy change on marijuana must fight against, it’s also the deep pockets of corporations with a vested interest in keeping marijuana illegal.
The state’s interest in maintaining the status quo is pretty easy to spot as well. Giving up any power is always a no-no for the state, so the ballot initiatives that have made marijuana more accessible to people are an anathema, as is the mere existence of the Second Amendment. Even as local and state authorities are restrained where ballot initiatives have made marijuana legal, federal agents can still act with impunity.
So, where there’s a confluence of individual liberty, guns AND marijuana, the state predictably lost its mind, as evidenced by the Ninth. Of course, to call this matter one of individual liberty at all, let alone a confluence of two liberties is a stretch – and it’s a stretch for the very reason that this entire matter even came up. Liberties don’t come with a license.
If there were no medical marijuana cards with their holders on file for government to search, and there was no paperwork and nonsense associated with buying a firearm, this entire matter would be a non-issue. The state has no right, let alone need to know who uses marijuana or for what. The state has less right and no need to know who owns what firearms – they’ve already proven themselves wholly incapable of preventing those they say shouldn’t have guns from getting them, but they do a marvelous job of stopping regular, decent people from protecting themselves.
Let government do its thing and get in the way, however, and these are the predictable results; especially when said government is as massive, bloated, intrusive and useless as our federal government.
And, of course, all of this nonsense is predicated on the asinine belief that any of it really matters. Yes, Wilson was denied buying a gun legally because she jumped through the hoops to be able to buy weed legally. Fortunately, there are still good, old-fashioned pot-dealers who don’t sell from behind a counter in a brick-and-mortar storefront; and, there’s always Armslist-dot-com, the latter of which is still actually perfectly legal. Thank goodness the lack of a firearm registry in the USA makes any notion of “universal background checks” laughable.
So, wait. Am I encouraging people who use marijuana to circumvent commercial, licensed dealers with their stupid yellow forms and just buy used guns from non-dealers who don’t make customers fill out the aforementioned stupid yellow form, even though their doing so would be technically illegal? Yes. Hell yes, I am.
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