In a 2021 survey, 15 percent of American adults admitted using illegal drugs (mostly marijuana) in the previous month. Other surveys suggest that something like 12 million of those drug users owned guns, making them guilty of a federal felony that is currently punishable by up to 15 years in prison. Yet fewer than 150 Americans are prosecuted for that crime each year.
Those odds make Patrick Darnell Daniels Jr., a Mississippi man who had two guns and the remains of a few joints in his car when he was stopped for a traffic violation last year, extremely unlucky. But Daniels caught a break last week, when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit ruled that his prosecution violated the Second Amendment, a decision that highlights the injustice of a policy that arbitrarily strips peaceful Americans of the constitutional right to armed self-defense.
