W<\/span>ith 350 million firearms of various caliber and magazine size floating around America, it appears that the government has little interest in taking our guns away.<\/p>\n There are so few instances of the government seizing the firearms of American citizens, that in order to round out\u00a0an \u201c8 times the government took your guns\u201d listicle<\/a>,\u00a0the magazine Guns and Ammo\u00a0had to reach all the way back to the Battle of Athens, Tennessee in 1946. By and large, the federal government is doing its job to follow the Second Amendment \u2014 except for when it comes to medical marijuana patients.<\/p>\n As Leafly News reported<\/a>, just three months after dispensaries opened for business<\/a> in the state, the Honolulu police department recently sent letters to patients in the state\u2019s medical-marijuana patient registry \u2014 ordering them to \u201cvoluntarily surrender\u201d their guns and ammunition within 30 days, or face some consequences.<\/p>\n Turns out the Second Amendment to the Constitution has an exception for anyone addicted to drugs. Cannabis patients aren\u2019t all necessarily addicted, of course, but for the purposes for possessing a firearm \u2014 this semantic doesn\u2019t matter.<\/p>\n Any \u201cunlawful user\u201d of a controlled substance is not eligible to own a firearm, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) declared in a 2011 open letter<\/a>. Since cannabis is a Schedule I substance, anyone using it is thus violating federal law. \u201cTherefore,\u201d the ATF wrote, \u201cany person who uses or is addicted to marijuana\u2026 is prohibited by federal law from possessing firearms or ammunition.\u201d<\/p>\n As bizarre as this Constitutional carve-out is in the era of widespread marijuana legalization, when a vast majority of Americans and a majority of often gun-loving Republicans<\/a> support legal cannabis, it is the law \u2014 and it survived a court challenge<\/a> at the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.<\/p>\n According to the Honolulu Star Advertiser<\/a>, 30 medical marijuana patients in Oahu received letters telling them to surrender their firearms in November.<\/p>\n \u201cYour medical marijuana use disqualifies you from ownership of firearms and ammunition,\u201d read the letters given to Hawaii medical marijuana cardholders, signed by police Chief Susan Ballard. \u201cA medical doctor\u2019s clearance letter is required for any future firearms applications or return of firearms from HPD evidence.\u201d<\/p>\n In this case, Ballard cites not federal law but state law \u2014 and, as Leafly reported, this appears to be the first instance in which a state agency has cited state law to seize firearms from state-legal cannabis users \u2014 though the argument and the result is the same, no matter which law is cited.<\/p>\n In theory, every marijuana user in the country could have their guns taken away, but Hawaii presents a unique opportunity. In other states, cannabis patients are able to wield weapons freely, because most states do not have a functional database of gun owners<\/a>.<\/p>\n As Leafly noted, Hawaii is unique in that it keeps electronic records<\/a> of both firearms owners and cannabis patients \u2014 which allows law enforcement to easily figure out who hits both sides of the Venn diagram, where they live, and what they possess.<\/p>\n Not every other state has such a list \u2014 and in states where recreational marijuana is legal, there would be no database, and so gun owners could shop at dispensaries and dab their days away after a visit to the shooting range in peace.<\/p>\n How serious the Honolulu police is about this \u2014 and whether they will go as far as to visit each cannabis-and-guns enthusiast\u2019s home to see whether the weapons have been surrendered \u2014 remains to be seen.<\/p>\n The gun lobby appears to be silent on the issue. So does Congress. Despite the widespread support, efforts to reschedule cannabis have been stymied by a minority of powerful committee chairs<\/a> \u2014 some of whom are the very same recipients of gun lobby cash<\/a>.<\/p>\n In this way, Hawaii\u2019s medical marijuana patients have come to know all about Big Government, in a way that gun users who are not medical marijuana patients cannot truly know.<\/p>\n TELL US,<\/b> do you think medical marijuana users should be able to own guns?<\/p>\n The post Hawaii Doesn\u2019t Want Medical Marijuana Patients To Own Guns<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
Honolulu police have issued letters to medical marijuana patients telling them that it was illegal to possess guns. With 350 million firearms of various caliber and magazine size floating around America, it appears that the government has little interest in taking our guns away. There are so few instances ofContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[50,80,2597,954,139,81],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21646"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21646"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21646\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21647,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21646\/revisions\/21647"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21646"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21646"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21646"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n
\nRead More: Hawaii Doesn\u2019t Want Medical Marijuana Patients To Own Guns<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"