This week, the Supreme Court agreed to hear oral arguments in a huge gun case, and in the process laid a trap for the progressive left that too many people are stumbling into. The case has always-online lefties arguing that an expansion of gun rights is the correct political and legal outcome, but that is getting things all twisted.

The case is called US v. Hemani, and it revolves around the application of a federal statute—18 USC Section 922(g)(3)—that prohibits gun ownership for any person who is “an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance.” This is the exact law that Hunter Biden was convicted under—and that led Joe Biden to pardon his son.

The hypocrisy of this law is flagrant. Alcoholics are allowed to own guns. In some counties, you can stumble from your local bar to your local gun shop and be strapped before closing time. It is absurd that a person who is too drunk to operate a car is allowed to carry a gun on their person, but a weed smoker is not allowed to keep a gun in their house. Do you know how many mass shootings have been committed by people who were high on weed? My guess is zero… they all decided to shoot up the place tomorrow.

Ali Danial Hemani challenged the hypocrisy of this law. Hemani’s home in Texas was searched by the FBI in August, 2022. The feds found a Glock 9mm, 60 grams of marijuana (roughly equivalent to two ounces), and 4.7 grams of cocaine. I am going to assume that the FBI was looking for something a little more incriminating than some recreational drugs and a handgun, but, like Hunter Biden, the only thing the government was able to charge Hemani with was this violation of Section 922.

Hemani was able to get his case dismissed. The government could not show that Hemani “was presently or even recently engaged in unlawful drug use.” The government busted this guy for having a gun while possessing drugs, but they couldn’t even prove that he was on the drugs he had in his house. On appeal, the Fifth Circuit affirmed the dismissal of Hemani’s case.

But then, the Trump administration got involved. Solicitor General John Sauer asked the Supreme Court to overturn the dismissal of Hemani’s case, and affirm Section 922 and the government’s right to harass recreational drug users who have guns.

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I cannot prove that the Hunter Biden situation had anything to do with the Trump administration’s decision to appeal this case. But everything I know about this small, petty, vindictive administration tells me that it’s pursuing this case to make it look like there was some deep legal principle behind its persecution of the former president’s son. Call it a hunch. Without Hunter, it makes no sense for this administration to appeal a ruling from the most conservative appellate court in the country that further extends Second Amendment rights in Texas.

The Supreme Court’s decision to hear the Trump administration’s appeal makes more sense. That’s because the lower courts are all over the map on how to apply Section 922 nowadays.

There is legitimate legal chaos when it comes to applying this rule, and it all stems from the Supreme Court’s second-worst opinion from 2022, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen (the worst case from that term was, of course, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization). Bruen articulated the absolutely insane proposition that for a gun law to be applicable in the 21st century there needs to be a “historical analogue” from the 18th century. What counts as a historical analogue? Nobody really knows! Since the Republicans on the Supreme Court are making this crap up as they go along, nobody can know if some random piece of parchment Nic Cage found in the basement of the Washington Monument counts as enough of an “analogue” to ban tactical nuclear weapons for home defense.

Solicitor General Sauer believes that he has an appropriate analogue that allows the government to keep guns out of the hands of drug users. He cites (wait for it) 18th-century restrictions on gun possession by “habitual drunkards.” That’s right: To support a law that bans drug users, but not alcoholics, from owning guns, the Trump administration is citing laws that banned alcoholics from owning guns. I honestly don’t know how Republicans even write these things down without their brains exploding from the cognitive dissonance.

Between the blatant hypocrisy of conservative lawyers, the stupidity of the law at issue, and the possible anti-Biden motivation, you can see why a lot of people on the left want the court to resolve this case in favor of Hemani and drug users everywhere. But that would be a mistake.

I mentioned that Section 922 G-3 is the statute that bans guns for drug users and people with drug addictions. Anybody want to know what some of the other numbers in that section of law address? The law is part of the Gun Control Act of 1968. It was passed as a response to all of the political assassinations of the 1960s (there was a time in this country when we addressed political violence by strengthening gun laws instead of going on podcasts). Subsection G creates categories of people prohibited from owning firearms. G-2 bans guns for fugitives from justice. G-6 bans people who were dishonorably discharged from the military from continuing to own guns. G-8 deals with the people subject to restraining orders. G-9 bans guns from people convicted of domestic violence. Having the Supreme Court throw out G-3 opens the door for them to throw out a whole bunch of stuff in that law, and given this court, that result would be exceptionally bad.

Lots of people should not own guns, including many people on this list. That is the principle we should be fighting for. While I don’t have any fear of Matthew McConaughey owning a gun in Texas even though he was arrested while smoking a joint and playing the bongos, any decision that restores gun rights to harmless habitual drug users will open the way to restoring gun rights to people who have committed more sinister crimes. We narrowly dodged this bullet 18 months ago in US v. Rahimi. In that case, an 8–1 court ruled that guns can be taken away from domestic abusers under a restraining order. The Republican justices went out of their way to make the Rahimi ruling as narrow as possible (I explained their bonkers reasoning at the time), so the specter of violent or unhinged people getting their hands on weapons is always at the door. If disarming Hunter Biden is the price we have to pay to disarm a convicted felon like… Donald Trump, then so be it.

The way to deal with the dripping hypocrisy of drug users having their guns taken away is for Congress to repeal the section, not the courts. Congress, the people we elect to do this work for us and the people we can recall every two years if we don’t like what they’re doing, is the place to right this wrong.

We should stop criminalizing drug use and drug addiction. That is the foundational problem. If you solved for that, you’d solve the whole problem here, without having to go back to 1791 to figure it out. It is this country’s puritanical obsession with recreational drug use that is the problem, not the legal principle that says “convicted felons should probably not have weapons.”

Will this Republican Congress repeal the Hunter Biden law? No, certainly not. But why didn’t Democrats repeal it when they controlled Congress? Why didn’t Biden pardon everybody who was convicted under this stupid law, instead of only his son? I know I’m crying over milk that spilled, curdled, and got stepped on so much it’s now cheese, but when I say I want Democrats to run on a decriminalization platform, this is what I’m talking about. There is a solution to this problem; it just requires Congress to do its job.

This is not the job for the courts. The Supreme Court should follow the law, even this part of this law which is demonstrably dumb and ill-conceived. The last thing we should want is for Clarence Thomas to invent some ahistorical claptrap for why another group of people must have unfettered access to weapons just because some knight of the Round Table was getting high on nightshade before going out to joust.

The expansion of gun rights is never the right answer. The decriminalization of drug addiction usually is. Let’s keep our eyes on the eight ball.