By Greg Drobny
This may come as a shock to you, but our government has become incredibly complex and confusing. It’s almost as if it contradicts itself at numerous levels because of this complexity (which we totally know can’t be true because government is the best!).
Full disclosure before the rundown on this story: it’s going to be short because I have something really, really big planned on the topic of gun control. The true fundamental issues at stake here will be discussed in much greater detail soon, so I will keep this brief.
This week the 9th Circuit Court held that anyone with a Medical Marijuana card can and should be denied their Second Amendment rights, because that cannabis stuff is super evil and makes you do crazy stuff. How do they know this? Well, because of the amazing scientific knowledge of our beloved Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, which knows that marijuana is super-duper bad. 
And how, you may ask, does the BATF know this? Well, if you’re looking for a valid, scientific reason, you’re going to be searching for a very, very long time. Because they don’t have one.
What they do have, however, are rules. Lots of rules. And these rules specifically state that a person who uses illegal drugs shouldn’t have guns because people who use illegal drugs are more prone to violence.
Who wrote these rules? Well the perfectly unbiased arbiter known as the BATF, of course. So this circle is tidied up very nicely. Nothing to see here, folks. Move along!
Exxxxxxxcept I have a question, teacher!
Ugh. You’re not going to ask me about the fact that the BATF never actually presented any evidence of marijuana users being more violent to the court, are you?
Well, actually I…
Oh, let me guess, you’re going to point out that the 9th Circuit Court fully admitted that this evidence wasn’t presented but that it didn’t matter?
Yes, but also that…
Or that the BATF is writing its own rules, enforcing them, and then getting them backed up by a federal court? Or that the BATF is, by its very name and existence, unconstitutional? Or that the federal government really has no constitutional authority to wage a “war on drugs”? Oh, I bet you’re going to bring up the fact that if a person has a Medical Marijuana card then it is technically a “legal” drug, therefore the argument about it being an illegal drug is irrelevant?!? Or is it that, based on current legal definitions, a person can be fully addicted to prescribed OxyContin and still maintain their civil liberties, so long as it’s not that evil marijuana?! Which smarty-pants question do you have next???
…
In all seriousness, there are so many issues going on here that it’s difficult to keep track of them all. For example, if a state rules that marijuana is legal, but the federal government says that it isn’t, do your constitutional rights matter? Does a state have any real authority against a federal agency that never should have existed in the first place? When individual rights are in question (in a case of state law vs federal law), why are we erring on the side of not-liberty rather than the other way around?
Again, I’ll be covering the topic of gun control in a pretty detailed fashion soon, so a great deal of this will be addressed at a much more fundamental level. But for now I think it’s important to note the utterly confusing nature of having big bureaucracy attempting to fix issues that are actually pretty simple, and how federal authorities very clearly see themselves as having a moral high ground over and above the “common man” that flies in the face of the principles this country was founded upon.
We live in a time where governing authorities don’t need “evidence” to strip liberties from you, the individual. The assumption is that you shouldn’t have them unless you come up with overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
That’s not just wrong—it’s un-American at its core.
But we’ll get more into that soon enough.