Colorado Initiative On Marijuana And Concealed Carry Firearm Permits Fails To Qualify For Ballot

A proposed initiative to protect the Second Amendment rights of marijuana consumers in Colorado will not appear on November’s ballot following the campaign’s failure to collect and submit enough signatures to qualify the measure.

“We unfortunately fell short of the required signatures,” Edgar Antillon, co-founder of the nonprofit Guns for Everyone, told Marijuana Moment in an email. His group is the chief backer of the proposal, known as Initiative 147.

The campaign managed to gather about 90,000 total signatures, Antillon said on Wednesday, but organizers needed to submit 124,238 valid voter signatures by August 5.

The result was “great for how underfunded and understaffed we were,” he added, “but short nonetheless.”

The proposal would have removed a Colorado restriction that currently prohibits law enforcement from granting concealed handgun permits to people who use cannabis. The measure would have amended that policy to say that sheriffs “shall not use a permit applicant’s lawful use of marijuana pursuant to [the state constitution] as a basis for denying the applicant a permit.”

Colorado legalized adult-use cannabis through a ballot initiative in 2012, though the substance remains prohibited at the federal level. And under federal law, being an “unlawful user” of a controlled substance, including marijuana, means a person cannot legally buy or possess a gun.

While the ballot proposal would not have affected that federal law, it would have removed a separate state barrier around the issuance of concealed handgun permits. What constitutes an “unlawful user of or addicted to marijuana,” it says, should be determined “only as provided in state law and regulations.”

The campaign was prepared to begin gathering signatures to qualify the measure earlier this year, but the Initiative Title Setting Review Board dealt the effort a setback when it said in mid-January that a previous version of the proposal would violate the state’s single-subject rule for voter initiatives.

In February, organizers submitted new language, which was approved by state officials the following month.

In an interview with Marijuana Moment late last year, as the campaign was working to qualify the earlier version of its proposal, Antillon said support for the reform seems to have grown in recent years among both gun-rights advocates and the cannabis community.

“I think this is one of those things that most Coloradans are in favor of,” Antillon said. “It’s a freedom that everybody should have access to.”

At the federal level, enforcement of the rule against gun purchases or ownership by marijuana users has been inconsistent. Attorneys for President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden, for example—who earlier this year was convicted of illegally owning a firearm while a user of illegal drugs—have argued that millions of marijuana users in legal states already own guns.

In June, Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky said the same thing, arguing that Hunter Biden “might deserve to be in jail for something, but purchasing a gun is not it.”

“There are millions of marijuana users who own guns in this country,” Massie said, “and none of them should be in jail for purchasing or possessing a firearm.”

The younger Biden’s legal team has claimed that even the prosecutor on the case has acknowledged that “an ordinary citizen would not be prosecuted for this offense,” which they argued “is borne out by DOJ’s policy and statistical evidence.”

DOJ, however, has continued to argue in federal courts that outlawing guns for marijuana users is both constitutional and good public policy. Government attorneys argued in a filing this summer that the ban on marijuana users owning guns is supported by a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision that upheld the government’s ability to limit the Second Amendment rights of people with domestic violence restraining orders.

The case in which DOJ made that argument, United States v. Daniels, was set to be considered by the Supreme Court but was among a number of firearms-related cases remanded back to lower courts following the court’s domestic violence ruling, U.S. v. Rahimi.

In its latest brief in Daniels, now with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, the government wrote that a 1968 policy that outlawed firearm possession by “narcotic addicts, mental defectives…and others whose possession of firearms is contrary to the public interests” is “consistent with the nation’s history and tradition of temporarily prohibiting firearm possession by individuals who present a special danger of misuse armed.”

“This historically justified category includes armed drug users,” the filing continues.

Two “particular categories” of people who “present a special danger of misuse” are “the intoxicated and the mentally ill,” says the 13-page document, filed by U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Mississippi Todd W. Gee and assistant U.S. attorneys Gaines H. Cleveland and Jonathan D. Buckner. Restrictions on both categories, they added, are backed by historical precedent.

DOJ lawyers similarly doubled down on the government restriction on firearms by marijuana users in a separate case in the Eleventh Circuit. In that matter, which was also remanded after the Rahimi decision, group of Florida medical cannabis patients arguing that their Second Amendment rights are being violated because they cannot lawfully buy firearms so long as they are using cannabis as medicine, despite acting in compliance with state law.

The Biden administration, meanwhile, argues that medical marijuana patients who possess firearms “endanger public safety,” “pose a greater risk of suicide” and are more likely to commit crimes “to fund their drug habit.”

The Justice Department has claimed in multiple federal cases over the past several years that the statute banning cannabis consumers from owning or possessing guns is constitutional because it’s consistent with the nation’s history of disarming “dangerous” individuals.

Last year, for example, the Justice Department told the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit that historical precedent “comfortably” supports the restriction. Cannabis consumers with guns pose a unique danger to society, the Biden administration claimed, in part because they’re “unlikely” to store their weapon properly.

Meanwhile, some states have passed their own laws either further restricting or attempting to preserve gun rights as they relate to marijuana. Recently, for example, a Pennsylvania lawmaker introduced a bill meant to remove state barriers to medical marijuana patients carrying firearms.

The U.S. District Court for the Western District of Oklahoma ruled last year that the ban prohibiting people who use marijuana from possessing firearms is unconstitutional, with the judge stating that the federal government’s justification for upholding the law is “concerning.”

In U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, a judge ruled last April that banning people who use marijuana from possessing firearms is unconstitutional—and it said the same legal principle also applies to the sale and transfer of guns.

Last August, meanwhile, ATF sent a letter to Arkansas officials saying that the state’s recently enacted law permitting medical cannabis patients to obtain concealed carry gun licenses “creates an unacceptable risk,” and could jeopardize the state’s federally approved alternative firearm licensing policy.

Shortly after Minnesota’s governor signed a legalization bill into law last year, the agency issued a reminder emphasizing that people who use cannabis are barred from possessing and purchases guns and ammunition “until” federal prohibition ends.

In 2020, ATF issued an advisory specifically targeting Michigan that requires gun sellers to conduct federal background checks on all unlicensed gun buyers because it said the state’s cannabis laws had enabled “habitual marijuana users” and other disqualified individuals to obtain firearms illegally.

The Hawaii attorney general’s office recently released data showing that, of the roughly 500 firearm permit applications denied by officials in the state last year, more than 40 percent were rejected because of applicants’ status as medical marijuana patients.

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