Legal commentator and retired attorney Mark Pulliam said the U.S. Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling in United States v. Hemani represents an important victory for Second Amendment rights while leaving unanswered questions about how Congress should regulate gun ownership by drug users.
Discussing the case during Monday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show, Pulliam explained that the Court’s ruling struck down a federal law used to prohibit certain drug users from possessing firearms. The decision was authored by Justice Neil Gorsuch.
“It was a unanimous decision, and it found unconstitutional a provision of federal law that prohibits drug users from owning guns,” Pulliam said.
Pulliam said Gorsuch focused heavily on the historical relationship between firearms ownership and alcohol consumption in America.
“From oral argument, Gorsuch was asking a bunch of questions to the counsel saying, ‘Isn’t it true that, back in the founding era, people consumed a lot of alcohol and that John Adams said that every morning he had a big glass of hard cider?'” Pulliam said.
According to Pulliam, Gorsuch incorporated that historical reality into the Court’s analysis.
“What he did was knit into this decision that the Second Amendment precludes any legal requirement that gun ownership be accompanied by abstinence from intoxicating substances,” Pulliam said.
The case involved a defendant whose firearm was discovered during an investigation into another alleged offense.
“He was being investigated for some other crime, and they were searching his house, and they found the gun, and he admitted, ‘Yeah, I smoke pot once in a while,'” Pulliam said. “They couldn’t bust him for the thing they were investigating him for. They said at least we can get him for illegal ownership of a gun.”
Pulliam compared the statute at issue to the law used in the federal prosecution of Hunter Biden, though he noted differences between the cases.
“This is the same statute that was used to indict Hunter Biden that he had lied on the form. But it’s different. He was an addict and so forth,” Pulliam said.
Although all nine justices agreed on the outcome, Pulliam observed that the decision produced an unusual mix of concurring opinions from both conservative and liberal members of the Court.
“The price of this unanimous decision is that there were a lot of concurrences trying to say what the decision means and what it doesn’t mean,” Pulliam said.
He highlighted some of the unusual alliances among the justices.
“You had a conservative hero, Sam Alito, wrote a concurring opinion that was joined by Obama appointee Elena Kagan. And we had [Ketanji Brown Jackson], who is our least favorite judge, agreeing in signing this unanimous decision, agreeing with Clarence Thomas,” Pulliam said. “So it was a weird combination.”
Pulliam suggested that the political dynamics of the case helped explain the Court’s broad agreement.
“[T]he Left supports drug users, the right supports gun ownership, and in this case, you had a drug user who owned a gun,” Pulliam said. “What do you do? You say we’ll sort it out later, but this guy should not have been prosecuted for illegal possession.”
While Pulliam characterized the ruling as a victory for gun rights advocates, he emphasized that the Court left many questions unresolved.
“In an ideal world, Congress would fix this statute, would read this decision, and would clarify and come up with what type of drug use is disqualifying,” Pulliam said.
The Supreme Court, he noted, addressed only the specific law before it.
“The Court is leaving all those details for later, and it may be that they’re gonna have to come back someday and figure this out,” Pulliam said. “But what we do know is that Congress cannot automatically bar all users of illegal drugs from having guns.”
The ruling did not address how the law might apply to convicted felons, addicts, or individuals with more extensive drug use histories.
“Whether the rule would be if you were a felon convicted of a drug-related crime, whether you were an actual addict, how heavily you used it — all those things are factual issues that the court didn’t concern itself with,” Pulliam said.
Pulliam also used the discussion to criticize congressional inaction, arguing that lawmakers have increasingly failed to address legal issues identified by the courts.
“Congress has become dysfunctional. They can’t even pass a timely budget,” Pulliam said. “We have these continuing resolutions. We have government shutdowns. It’s ridiculous.”
As a result, Pulliam argued, presidents have attempted to fill the void through executive action.
“Because the Congress is not doing its job, the president has to basically legislate from the White House with all these executive orders,” he said.
Pulliam concluded by arguing that the nation’s governing institutions are trapped in a cycle created by congressional inaction.
“And then people blame the courts when Congress is not doing its job,” Pulliam said. “Anyway, it’s a big mess and needs to be fixed.”
🇺🇸A UNANIMOUS 2nd Amendment victory at SCOTUS last week. Our legal analyst Mark Pulliam explains the details of the decision.⚖️ pic.twitter.com/AJ1Y0CbZoi
— Michael Patrick Leahy (@michaelpleahy) June 22, 2026
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network.
