‘Habitual drunkards?’ Justice suggests Founding Fathers drank way too much to meet today’s gun ownership standards

America’s founding fathers probably drank too much alcohol to keep their guns under modern standards, Justice Neil Gorsuch suggested Monday.

Several Supreme Court justices appeared skeptical Monday of the Trump administration’s defense of a statute that prohibits “unlawful users” or addicts of any controlled substance, including marijuana, from owning firearms.

Principal Deputy Solicitor General Sarah Harris pointed to founding-era restrictions on the rights of habitual drunkards as historical justification for disarming marijana users, but Gorsuch highlighted a key difference in how the government now defines “habitual.”

“The American Temperance Society, back in the day, said 8 shots of whiskey a day only made you an occasional drunkard…To be a habitual drunkard, you had to do double that,” Gorsuch said during oral arguments for United States v. Hemani.

“John Adams took a tankard of hard cider with his breakfast everyday,” he sad. “James Madison reportedly drank a pint of whiskey every day. Thomas Jefferson said he wasn’t much of a user of alcohol, he only drank 3-4 glasses of wine a night. Are they all habitual drunkards who would be properly disarmed for life?”

While the government contends defendant Ali Danial Hemani is a drug dealer with suspected ties to Iranian terrorists, he is only being charged for owning a handgun while admitting to consuming marijuana “a few times a week.” The case stems from his challenge to that indictment under 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(3).

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals previously tossed Hemani’s indictment.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson indicated the government’s position falls apart under their 2022 holding in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen, where the majority held firearm restrictions must be “consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

“The modern legislature, under our Bruen test, only gets to do the policy judgments of the historical ones,” she said. “We have to see that the historical legislature, going back to Justice Gorsuch’s point, was making a determination that someone who only drinks or takes an intoxicant once every other day and is not doing so while he’s using a firearm can be disarmed. If we don’t see that, the fact that today’s Congress thinks that person is dangerous is irrelevant.”

Justice Samuel Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts appeared more sympathetic to the government’s position.

“The most commonly used illegal drugs either had not been invented at the time of adoption of the Second Amendment or the adoption of the 14th Amendment,” Alito said. “Heroin was invented in 1874, cocaine 1855, methamphetamine 1893, fentanyl 1959, marijana existed, but my understanding, hemp was grown for industrial purposes, my understanding is it was not consumed to any degree by people in the United States until at least the beginning of 20th century.”

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