Two firearm rights rulings came down within a week of each other this June, one from the U.S. Supreme Court and one from the Washington Supreme Court, and they do not sit easily together. If you read them side by side, the reasoning the U.S. Supreme Court used to unanimously protect a marijuana user’s gun rights in United States v. Hemani looks a lot like the reasoning four Washington justices used, and lost with, in McLellan and Holloway v. Brown.
I want to walk through why these two cases are now in tension, and speculate honestly about what that might mean for anyone challenging Washington’s recidivist DUI firearm ban down the road. I will say up front that this is speculation. The U.S. Supreme Court has not touched McLellan, and nothing here is a prediction of how a future case will actually turn out.
Two Rulings, Same Month, Same Core Question
On June 11, 2026, the Washington Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in McLellan and Holloway v. Brown that the state can permanently bar someone from possessing a firearm after two DUI convictions within seven years under RCW 9.41.040(2)(a)(i)(D), with no individual finding that the person is actually dangerous. The majority held that the legislature can disarm an entire category of people based on their conviction history alone, reasoning that recidivist drunk driving has a “plausible link to physical violence” even without proof of violence in any specific case.
A week later, on June 18, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 9-0 in Hemani that the federal government could not prosecute Ali Hemani under 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(3) for owning a gun while regularly using marijuana, because the government showed nothing more than regular use and never showed he was actually dangerous or impaired when he possessed the firearm. Justice Gorsuch wrote for the Court, holding that the government’s prosecution of a defendant under a statute prohibiting unlawful drug users from possessing a gun violated the Second Amendment as applied to him.
Gorsuch’s opinion is worth reading for more than the holding. To justify the law, the government analogized Hemani to a historical “habitual drunkard,” someone the founding generation would have considered too impaired to be trusted with a gun. Gorsuch turned that analogy back on the government using the founders themselves. He pointed out that John Adams drank hard cider with breakfast every day, James Madison reportedly went through a pint of whiskey a day, and Thomas Jefferson had three or four glasses of wine most nights. None of them, on the government’s own historical standard, would have qualified as a habitual drunkard properly disarmed for life. If regular, even heavy, consumption was not enough to strip the founders of their rights, the Court reasoned, it cannot be enough to strip a modern marijuana user of his. To state the government’s analogy, Gorsuch wrote, was to expose its deficiency.
Now imagine Adams, Madison, or Jefferson alive today, driving home after a day of their usual drinking. Whether they would have picked up two DUIs in seven years is impossible to say, but it isn’t hard to imagine. The more interesting question is what they would have made of a law that took their guns away over it, permanently, with no court ever asked whether they were actually dangerous to anyone.
It’s hard to imagine that they would have accepted it. These were men who spent their careers arguing that government should not get to punish you for what you might do, only for what you have done and been proven to have done. Madison helped write the Bill of Rights specifically to limit this kind of power, the power to decide ahead of time, without a hearing, that a whole category of people cannot be trusted with a right. That is what Gorsuch found objectionable about the federal drug-user gun ban in Hemani, and it is what Washington’s law does to recidivist drunk drivers. A founder who drank a pint of whiskey a day and kept his rights is not the kind of person who would have quietly handed them over because a legislature decided his record made him a future risk.
Both cases turn on the same underlying question: can the government strip someone of their Second Amendment rights based on a category they fall into, or does the Constitution require proof that this particular person is actually dangerous? McLellan answered that categories are enough. Hemani answered that they are not, at least on the record the government had.
The Washington Dissent Was Arguing the Hemani Position
This is the part that makes the timing notable. The four dissenting justices in McLellan, led by Justice Whitener, made essentially the same argument that won unanimously a week later in Hemani. The dissent argued that the history and tradition of firearm restrictions was limited to preventing violent behavior by people who were individually found to be dangerous, and that the State was depriving individuals of their Second Amendment right before they commit a violent crime, based only on the assumption that one day they might.
The contrast in rigor is also worth noticing. Gorsuch’s opinion in Hemani did the historical work directly, naming Adams, Madison, and Jefferson to show the government’s “habitual drunkard” analogy did not hold up against the actual founding-era record. The McLellan majority, by comparison, did not do anything close to that kind of specific historical accounting. It leaned on a “plausible link to physical violence” between DUI convictions and future gun violence, a phrase the dissent specifically challenged, prompting the majority to clarify what it meant in a footnote. That is a much softer standard than the one Gorsuch applied a week later, and it is the kind of looser reasoning that Hemani‘s sharper historical method seems built to reject.
The majority opinion even cited Hemani in a footnote, noting it was still pending at the U.S. Supreme Court when McLellan was decided. The Washington court did not have the benefit of the Hemani opinion when it ruled. It now exists, and the reasoning the U.S. Supreme Court adopted maps closely onto the side that lost in Washington.
Where the Comparison Breaks Down
I want to be fair to the other side of this, because the cases are not identical and a future challenger would have real obstacles.
Hemani interpreted a federal statute, 922(g)(3), and rejected one specific historical analogy the government offered: comparing drug users to “habitual drunkards” who were so impaired they could not manage their own affairs. The Washington majority in McLellan relied on different historical analogs entirely, including surety and affray laws and the tradition of disarming people convicted of serious crimes generally. Hemani never addressed those analogs, and nothing in the opinion rejects them.
There is also a structural difference the McLellan majority leaned on directly: Hemani’s disarmament was based on an ongoing status, being a current drug user, while McLellan and Holloway’s disarmament was based on a criminal conviction that already happened. The majority drew a sharp line between status-based disarmament and conviction-based disarmament, and Hemani is a status case. A future litigant relying on Hemani would need to explain why that distinction does not save RCW 9.41.040, not just point to the result.
And critically, Hemani was explicit that its holding was narrow and tied to the government’s specific theory and specific record. It did not announce a general rule that categorical disarmament is unconstitutional. The government could still win a similar case with a different argument or better evidence.
These are not small obstacles, and any honest challenger has to deal with them. But they are obstacles to a specific argument, not a complete barrier against it.
What This Could Mean Going Forward
Hemani gives future Second Amendment challengers, including someone disarmed under Washington’s DUI statute, a stronger version of the argument the McLellan dissent already made and lost on. It is now backed by a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court opinion rather than four dissenting state justices. That does not mean RCW 9.41.040 is unconstitutional. The Washington majority anticipated and tried to distinguish exactly this kind of challenge by resting on convictions rather than status, and that distinction may well hold up. But the gap between “categorical disarmament needs no individualized dangerousness finding” and “categorical disarmament requires proof of actual dangerousness” just got a lot more contested at the U.S. Supreme Court level, and Washington’s law sits closer to the side that the Court rejected in Hemani than the McLellan majority would probably like to admit.
If you are someone who lost firearm rights under Washington’s DUI provision and you are considering a constitutional challenge or a restoration petition, this is exactly the kind of legal landscape shift worth discussing with an attorney. The argument is live. Whether it succeeds in any particular case depends heavily on the facts and on how the next court chooses to read these two opinions together.