From the Supreme Court oral argument earlier this week in United States v. Hemani (in which the issue is whether a federal law denying gun rights to users of marijuana is analogous to founding-era statutes denying gun rights to “habitual drunkards”):
JUSTICE GORSUCH: — [to counsel for the Untied States}… one can ask whether the habitual drunkard statutes are sufficiently — how and why sufficiently analogous. One could also ask, though, more basically whether this defendant would qualify as a habitual user, and I want to explore that before we lose track of it.
A habitual drunkard, the American Temperance Society back in the day said eight shots of whiskey a day only made you an occasional drunkard.
(Laughter.)
JUSTICE GORSUCH: We have to remember the founding era. If you want to invoke the founding era, to be a habitual drunkard, you had to do double that, okay?
John Adams took a tankard of hard cider with his breakfast every day. James Madison reportedly drank a pint of whiskey every day. Thomas Jefferson said he wasn’t much of a user of alcohol, he only had three or four glasses of wine a night, okay?
Are they all habitual drunkards who would be properly disarmed for life under your theory?
Posted at 6:03 AM