Federal Prohibition on Firearm Possession by People with Persistent and Present Drug Use Does Not Violate the Second Amendment
In United States v. Seiwert, 152 F.4th 854 (7th Cir. 2025), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit considered whether a federal law banning people who use drugs from possessing firearms violates the Second Amendment. The appeals court ruled that it does not. The court relied on historical laws that disarmed people who were intoxicated or mentally ill. This reasoning has important implications for forensic practitioners: the historical laws the appeals court relied on required both mental illness and a finding of dangerousness, but the modern application drops the dangerousness requirement, treating persistent impairment alone as sufficient ground for disarmament, an approach that creates tension with current research on violence risk.
Facts of the Case
In 2020, law enforcement searched John Seiwert’s home, finding over 100 firearms. Mr. Seiwert admitted he used crack cocaine hours before the search and had used heroin and crack cocaine daily for 20 years, describing himself as a “functioning drug addict.” A grand jury charged him with two counts of possessing a firearm while being an unlawful drug user under 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(3)(2015). This statute applies nationwide, prohibiting anyone who uses illegal drugs from possessing firearms.
Before trial, Mr. Seiwert argued the statute was unconstitutional. The district court disagreed, and a jury convicted him on both counts. He was sentenced to 12 months and one day in prison and three years of supervised release. Mr. Seiwert appealed to the Seventh Circuit.
Ruling and Reasoning
The Seventh Circuit affirmed Mr. Seiwert's conviction. Mr. Seiwert argued that the statute violated his Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. To evaluate this argument, the appeals court applied the framework from New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass'n, Inc. v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1 (2022). Under Bruen, courts must ask whether a gun regulation fits within America’s “historical tradition of firearm regulation” (Seiwert, p 861 (quoting Bruen, p 17)). In practice, this means the government must identify historical laws that are analogous to the modern regulation.
Applying this framework, the Seventh Circuit first assumed Mr. Seiwert was part of “‘the people’ whom the Second Amendment protects” and then looked for historical laws that resembled § 922(g)(3) (Seiwart, p 862). The appeals court found two types of Founding-era laws that it considered “relevantly similar.”
First, the court pointed to colonial and early American laws requiring “habitual drunkards” to post bond for good behavior; those who could not pay were confined, effectively losing access to weapons. Next, the court reviewed early laws restricting firearms for intoxicated people, including laws allowing officers to disarm drunk soldiers. Because Mr. Seiwert had used crack cocaine just hours before police arrived, the court found that the modern statute “performs the same function” as these historical laws.
Second, the court drew an analogy between chronic drug use and mental illness. The court noted the Founders sometimes equated intoxication with madness. It quoted the physician Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, who described drunkenness as “a temporary fit of madness” (Seiwert, p 867). The court then pointed to Founding-era laws that allowed authorities to confine people who were “furiously mad” or “so far disordered in their senses that they may be dangerous to be permitted to go abroad,” meaning too dangerous to move freely in public (Seiwert, p 867). These laws required both mental illness and a finding of dangerousness; a person with mental illness who posed no danger to society was allowed to remain free. The court noted that these laws confining mentally ill people were enacted around the time of the Second Amendment’s ratification. Because confinement meant losing access to weapons, the court treated these laws as historical precedent for disarming people based on mental illness and noted later laws in the 19th and 20th centuries were enacted to limit mentally ill people from possessing weapons.
Connecting these historical laws to Mr. Seiwert’s case, the court cited research showing that long-term heroin and cocaine use can cause lasting psychological deficits. Based on this, the court concluded that chronic drug users like Mr. Seiwert are similar enough to people with severe mental illness that the same historical justification applies. In the court’s words, disarming chronic drug users “is justified by closely analogous public safety concerns underlying historical laws preventing individual [sic] with severe mental illness from possessing firearms” (Seiwert, p 869).
The court held that § 922(g)(3) was constitutional as applied to Mr. Seiwert because he was “persistently and presently impaired” at the time (Seiwert, p 869). It distinguished the Fifth Circuit's decision in United States v. Daniels, 124 F.4th 967 (5th Cir. 2025), which struck down the statute as applied to an occasional cannabis user.
Discussion
Seiwert raises considerations for forensic practitioners because of the analogy at the heart of the court’s reasoning. The court did not simply say that people who use drugs are dangerous and therefore can be disarmed. Instead, it said that people with persistent and present impairment from drug use are like people with mental illness and that historical laws disarming people with mental illness provide the constitutional basis for this restriction. This reasoning drops the individualized dangerousness inquiry that the historical laws required, creating tension with what we know from research and clinical practice.
In considering the court’s rationale, the Bruen framework helps explain why the Seiwert court reasoned this way. Under Bruen, courts must find historical support for gun regulations. Because there were no Founding-era laws specifically about drug users and firearms, the Seiwert court looked for analogous laws and landed on laws about mental illness. But even that analogy was a stretch. The court acknowledged that “Founding-era regulations specifically addressing the intersection of mental illness and firearms are hard to come by” (Seiwert, p 867). To bridge this gap, it pointed to laws allowing confinement of the “furiously mad,” reasoning that confinement effectively meant disarmament. But the historical laws the court relied on required a two-part showing: mental illness and a separate finding of dangerousness. The modern application collapses these into one, treating persistent impairment as itself sufficient without requiring individualized evidence that the person poses any actual risk.
This is where the tension with forensic practice arises. The effect of the Seiwert court's reasoning is to treat persistent impairment as inherently dangerous, but research does not support this assumption. Large studies have shown that mental illness alone is a weak predictor of violence. One major epidemiological study found that mental illness accounts for only about three to five percent of violence in the community (Elbogen EB, Johnson SC. The intricate link between violence and mental disorder: results from the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions. Arch Gen Psychiatry. 2009; 66:152–61). Similarly, a meta-analysis of studies on schizophrenia and violence found that, although there is some elevated risk, the majority of people with schizophrenia are not violent (Fazel S, Gulati G, Linsell L, et al. Schizophrenia and violence: systematic review and meta-analysis. PLoS Med 2009; 6:e1000120).
As forensic practitioners, we are trained to assess violence risk through individualized evaluation, looking at specific factors for a specific person rather than relying on diagnosis as a proxy for dangerousness. The reasoning in Seiwert reflects a different approach. It uses a historical category (“the mentally ill”) to justify a modern restriction without asking whether that category actually predicts the harm the law is meant to prevent. The court’s reasoning does contain some nuance: by distinguishing Seiwert from the occasional cannabis user in Daniels, the court signaled that only “persistent and present” impairment triggers disarmament. But this categorical distinction still differs from the individualized dangerousness inquiry that the historical laws required.
These are not merely doctrinal concerns. When courts reinforce the framework that mental illness signals dangerousness, they may discourage people from seeking treatment and place clinicians and forensic evaluators in a difficult position, navigating the tension between their professional goals and legal reporting requirements. Seiwert illustrates a broader challenge. The Bruen framework requires courts to reason from historical laws, even when those laws rested on assumptions that current research does not support. For forensic practitioners, this creates a tension: when we conduct evaluations, write reports, or testify about violence risk, we may be working within a legal system that treats mental illness as categorically dangerous in ways that our training tells us it is not.
- © American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law
