The federal government is relying on “startling and dangerous” arguments to defend banning medical marijuana patients from owning firearms, attorneys argued in their latest filing in an ongoing federal appeals case.
Weeks after the Justice Department submitted its brief to the court, asserting that lifting the ban would have “wide-ranging” unintended consequences, attorneys representing Florida medical cannabis patients filed their response last week, disputing the government’s position point-by-point.
Many of the areas of legal disagreement are familiar to those who’ve followed the case over the past year. Plaintiffs are asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit to overturn a federal district court’s decision to dismiss the lawsuit, maintaining that the gun ban for state-legal marijuana patients is unconstitutional and inconsistent with recent U.S. Supreme Court precedent.
In the court’s ruling in that separate case out of New York, justices generally created a higher standard for policies that seek to impose restrictions on gun rights. The ruling states that any such restrictions must be consistent with the historical context of the Second Amendment’s original 1791 ratification.
DOJ has approached the case from a number of angles, including some that caught headlines for comparing medical cannabis patients to people who are mentally ill, panhandlers, Catholics and other groups that were previously deprived of the right to possess firearms.
Most recently, the Justice Department said that allowing medical marijuana patients to have guns could undermine the government’s ability to restrict firearm ownership by people who are addicted to controlled substances like fentanyl, cocaine and methamphetamine.
In their response brief last week, the plaintiffs pushed back on that line of argument.
“Likely realizing the lack of historical support for their position as applied to state law-compliant medical marijuana users, the Appellees attempt to lump such use in with more serious and dangerous substances such as cocaine, heroin, fentanyl, and methamphetamines,” they said.
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