Regularly smoking weed does not necessarily void a person’s Second Amendment rights, according to a new ruling by a federal judge in Texas.

On Monday, US District Judge David Briones dismissed a criminal indictment against an El Paso man caught with multiple bags of marijuana and firearms in his home. He determined that the Government couldn’t prove the man was high at the time of his arrest. Therefore, his prosecution represented an unconstitutional application of the federal law that bans drug users from owning firearms.

“Defendant is part of ‘the people’ whose conduct is covered and protected by the Second Amendment,” Judge Briones wrote in US v. Gil. “Because he is part of ‘the people,’ the Government had the burden to identify a historical analogue similar enough to 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(3) to show that individuals like Defendant were disarmed at the time of the Founding. The Government failed to meet its burden. Therefore, the Court finds that 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(3) is unconstitutional as applied to Defendant.”

The decision highlights the continued legal fallout over the federal gun ban for drug users in the circuit that has done more to call it into question than any other. Though the states covered under the Fifth Circuit—Texas, Mississippi, and Louisiana—all align with the Federal Government in prohibiting recreational marijuana use, the appellate court has nevertheless ruled in favor of the gun rights of marijuana users on multiple occasions over the last two years.

Judge Briones, a Bill Clinton appointee seated in the Western District of Texas, leaned on those previous rulings to reach his decision.

“The Fifth Circuit made clear that history and tradition do not support disarming someone solely based on past drug use,” he wrote.

Instead, he looked at whether there were factors beyond the Defendant’s marijuana possession that warranted his disarmament and imprisonment.

Officers arrested Defendant Adrian Gil in 2021 after being called to his house over a “fight involving a firearm,” according to court documents. They then discovered at least two “large vacuum sealed” bags of marijuana and “multiple guns” inside Gil’s home. The arresting officers also said Gil admitted to being a daily user of marijuana since the age of 14 and acknowledged that he knew marijuana users could not legally own firearms. He was subsequently indicted, pled guilty, and was sentenced to 35 months in prison before he moved to appeal his charges on constitutional grounds.

At the first step of his analysis, Briones ruled that the plain text of the Second Amendment covered both Gil and his conduct.

“The coverage of the Second Amendment is broad at this stage of the analysis and the language of the Second Amendment is clear on this point,” he wrote. “The Bill of Rights uses the phrase ‘the people’ five times. In each place, it refers to all members of our political community, not a special group of upright citizens.”

Briones then looked at whether there was a valid historical tradition of disarming people like Gil, as required by the test the Supreme Court laid down in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen. He said that the Fifth Circuit’s prior marijuana rulings established that the historical record only supports limits on a “presently intoxicated person’s” gun rights. To meet its burden for upholding Gil’s charges and conviction, he argued the Government would have to prove that Gil was armed and actively intoxicated at the time of his arrest. Briones concluded the Government failed to do that.

“While the Government goes to great lengths to disclose that Defendant’ admitted being a daily user of marihuana since age 14′ and that Defendant ‘just like[d] good weed,’ it does nothing in the way of proving that Defendant was intoxicated by marijuana at the time of this incident, or at the time he was arrested,” Briones concluded. “In line with the Fifth Circuit’s reasoning in Connelly, this Court agrees that ‘based on habitual or occasional drug use, § 922(g)(3) imposes a far greater burden on [Defendant’s] Second Amendment rights than our history and tradition of firearms regulation can support.'”