PA Bill Number: SB945
Title: Consolidating the act of August 9, 1955 (P.L.323, No.130), known as The County Code; and making repeals.
Description: Consolidating the act of August 9, 1955 (P.L.323, No.130), known as The County Code; and making repeals. ...
Last Action: Third consideration and final passage (199-0)
Last Action Date: Apr 17, 2024
Lawmakers Seek To Address Gun Rights Of Medical Marijuana Patients :: 02/09/2019
When Hawaii decided to confiscate guns of medical marijuana patients, there was outrage. For better or worse, the police department was on solid legal ground. Federal law prohibits gun ownership by anyone using prohibited substances.
Now, lawmakers in some states are looking to fix that.
To start with, we have Oklahoma.
An Oklahoma lawmaker has filed a bill that he hopes will protect the gun rights of medical marijuana users.
A new state senate bill would allow medical marijuana license holders to own firearms. It would still be illegal to be under the influence of marijuana to use or carry a gun, however.
Honestly, that sounds fair. Not everyone who has a medical marijuana license will be high all the time, after all.
But Oklahoma isn’t the only state with a lawmaker looking to deal with this issue.
For some time, Colorado has been shifting anti-gun as well as being the first state to legalize marijuana for recreational use. So it’s an interesting juxtaposition between those two positions leading to a bill designed to protect the Second Amendment rights of people using marijuana. Too bad the Democrats already killed it.
A Republican lawmaker’s bid to keep Coloradans authorized to use medical marijuana from being deprived of the right to own and carry firearms was rejected Wednesday by Democrats.
Senate Bill 93, proposed by state Sen. Vicki Marble, R-Fort Collins, died along party lines in the Senate State, Veterans and Military Affairs Committee. She said the Democrats’ decision to kill the bill was unfair to medical marijuana users, but not unexpected.
“They don’t want to pass a gun bill,” Marble said of the committee, on which she also sits. “Anything to do with guns they’re not going to vote on.”
…
Only one witness testified against the bill, Eileen McCarron, of Colorado Ceasefire.
The effects of marijuana include euphoria, anxiety, fear, distrust, panic, hallucinations and delusions, McCarron said.
“Putting lethal weapons into the hands of individuals experiencing these emotions is an unwise choice,” she said.
More than half a dozen others spoke in favor of Marble’s bill. Those witnesses included an unlikely ally in Michael Neil of the Colorado Cross-Disability Coalition, who said on any other day he would oppose concealed carry laws.
Only one witness and they were expressly anti-gun and would oppose any law that protects gun owners from anything, yet the state Democrats smacked the bill down anyway.
In other words, the Democrats are apparently conceding that people on marijuana are too dangerous to be trusted with firearms, which makes me wonder why so many of them pushed to legalize it in the first place? If people on the substance can’t be trusted with guns, why do we continue to trust them with cars, an item which is responsible for significantly more deaths on an annual basis than guns?
I applaud these lawmakers for looking to protect the Second Amendment for these people who have committed no crime in their states yet are being punished by being stripped of their constitutional rights. If marijuana is so dangerous, these states need to rescind the legal status of the drug rather than continue to punish law-abiding citizens.
Tom Knighton is a Navy veteran, a former newspaperman, a novelist, and a blogger and lifetime shooter. He lives with his family in Southwest Georgia. https://bearingarms.com/author/tomknighton/
