The Fourth Circuit tackles marijuana users, gun ownership and the Second Amendment
Yesterday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit released an interesting opinion considering the federal “unlawful user” statute. The unlawful user law makes it a crime for anyone who “is an unlawful user of and addicted to a constrolled substance” to possess a firearm–and yes, that includes marijuana.
A while back, the Fourth Circuit sent a case back to the trial court to conduct an evidentiary hearing on whether this law runs afoul of the Supreme Court’s recent Second Amendment jurisprudence. The trial court found that making it a crime for a marijuana user to possess a gun did not pose any Second Amendment problem. Yesterday, a unanimous panel of the Fourth Circuit agreed.
Here are a few excerpts from the opinion (PDF), by Judge Niemeyer, that provide an overview of the court’s reasoning:
Carter argues that the district court, in concluding that the government carried its burden, erred in two respects: (1) it improperly relied on factors other than empirical evidence in evaluating the soundness of § 922(g)(3); and (2) it failed to recognize that the studies submitted by the government were inadequate because they related to drug use generally rather than marijuana use specifically and they failed to prove a causal link between marijuana use and violence. He maintains that the studies he submitted demonstrate that, in fact, “marijuana users are not prone to violent behavior.”
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Focusing on the substance of the studies presented by the government to the district court, Carter contends that the data were inadequate because they related to drug use generally rather than marijuana use specifically and because they failed to prove a causal relationship between marijuana use and violence. He maintains that the studies he submitted, by contrast, demonstrated that “marijuana users are not prone to violent behavior.”
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We have little trouble concluding that the studies presented to the district court by both the government and Carter indicate a strong link between drug use and violence. A study by Carrie Oser and colleagues, offered by the government, found that probationers who had perpetrated violence in the past were significantly more likely to have used a host of drugs — marijuana, hallucinogens, sedatives, and heroin — than probationers who had never been involved in a violent episode. [The Court went on to cite a few additional studies.)
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Carter seeks to marginalize these studies, arguing first that they are too broad and discuss only “general categories of offenders, including those who abuse a range of controlled substances.” He contends that, even if there is a link between “harder” controlled substances and violence, the government’s evidence does not indicate that marijuana users are prone to violence. To the contrary, he claims that the evidence he submitted disproves such a link. Yet, even if such a particularized demonstration is necessary — an issue we need not reach — the studies presented by the government amply demonstrate a connection between marijuana use specifically and violence. The Harrison and Gfroerer study, for instance, found that, “[e]ven after controlling for other variables[,] such as age, race, income, education, and marital status, . . . using marijuana in the past year . . . [was] significantly related to criminal behavior.”
Carter also objects to the government’s evidence on the grounds that it demonstrated, at most, a correlation between marijuana use and violence and not a causal relationship. Quoting the Wei study, he argues that “[t]he relationship between marijuana use and violence ‘is due to the selection effects whereby these behaviors tend to co-occur in certain individuals, not because one behavior causes the other.’” (Emphasis added) (quoting Wei et al., Teasing Apart, at 166).
This argument is flawed, however, because it assumes, incorrectly, that Congress may not regulate based on correlational evidence. We conclude that it may and that the government need not prove a causal link between drug use and violence in order to carry its burden of demonstrating that there is a reasonable fit between § 922(g)(3) and an important government objective. . . . We have emphasized that, under intermediate scrutiny, the fit between the regulation and the harm need only be reasonable, not perfect. Carter I, 669 F.3d at 417. The correlational evidence put forward by the parties in the present case easily clears that bar.