A Rhode Island Superior Court has upheld the gun rights of a person growing medical marijuana under the state’s medical marijuana law. Obviously this only applies to a state action, the feds could still take a whack at this defendant if they chose to do so.
3 thoughts on “Weed and Guns”
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I wish I could explain this fully here, but I can still recall how a documentary that I saw on the History channel once explained in detail how the the NFA of 1934 and the federal law which criminalized marijuana were actually somehow intertwined. If I can recall correctly, the federal law against marijuana was passed just two or three years after the NFA, the federal law which regulates full-auto weapons, silencers, short-barrel rifles and shotguns, and AOW’s like pen guns.
Ronnie,
If I were to guess I would bet that they both required a tax stamp so the crime wasn’t actually having an NFA weapon or drugs, but not paying the stamp for them. They basically used taxes as a sort of ban on the items because the courts in that time wouldn’t have granted the Federal Government the ability to ban the items (10th amendment and all).
@ Jeffrey H: Your guess seems to me just about how it was explained in this History channel documentary which I mentioned above. Thanks for jarring my memory on that one. Now, I can still recall hearing both on this same program, and elsewhere too, that the NFA tax stamp was set by whoever thought of this tax stamp at the price of $200, because at the time of the 1930’s, $200 was thought to be well beyond the budgets of most Americans. Fortunately, nobody to my knowledge has ever tried to adjust that price for inflation, because otherwise the tax stamp would probably over $2000 by now.
As for the tax stamp on marijuana, I don’t think it was ever possible to actually pay for and receive one, right? The marijuana federal tax stamp was actually devised as a way to punish anybody who possessed marijuana for not having said federal tax stamp, I think. Or something like that. Am I wrong on this?