Veteran Sues Pennsylvania Over Carry Ban for Old Marijuana Conviction

A Gulf War veteran who can legally buy and own firearms but cannot get a license to carry one in Pennsylvania – all because of a single marijuana conviction from 1994 – is suing the state in federal court, in a case that tests how far a recent Supreme Court ruling on gun rights for marijuana users will reach.

Craig Philips, an honorably discharged Air Force veteran who later spent about a dozen years as a mechanic for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, applied for a Pennsylvania License to Carry Firearms in his home county of Butler in 2024. The state’s instant background-check system flagged a decades-old conviction for possessing a small amount of marijuana, and his application was denied. Under state law, that denial is permanent.

Philips filed his lawsuit on July 7, 2026, in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania, joined by the gun-rights group Gun Owners of America and its affiliated Gun Owners Foundation. The defendants are the acting commissioner of the Pennsylvania State Police, who runs the background-check system, and the Butler County sheriff who signed the denial, both sued in their official capacities.

A carry license, not a gun ban

The distinction at the center of the case matters. Philips is not barred from owning guns – he has passed background checks and bought handguns in the years since his conviction. What he cannot obtain is the carry license the state requires to bear a firearm in public.

That license does a lot of work in Pennsylvania. Without it, a resident cannot legally carry a concealed handgun, transport a firearm in a vehicle, carry a gun at all on the streets of Philadelphia, or carry during a declared state of emergency. A drug conviction, the complaint argues, effectively turns the entire city of Philadelphia into a no-carry zone for anyone with a record, and cuts an otherwise law-abiding owner off from bearing arms in ordinary public life.

Pennsylvania is a “shall-issue” state, meaning sheriffs must grant a carry license within 45 days unless an applicant trips a specific disqualifier. One of those disqualifiers is any conviction under the state’s drug act – no matter how minor the offense or how many years have passed. Philips’s 1994 offense was an ungraded misdemeanor punishable by at most 30 days in jail and a $500 fine, a lighter maximum than a typical low-level summary offense, the lowest rung of the state’s criminal code. It still triggers a lifetime bar.

Leaning on the Supreme Court’s marijuana ruling

The suit builds directly on United States v. Hemani, the June 2026 decision in which the Supreme Court held that marijuana use alone could not justify stripping a person of their gun rights, absent evidence they were actually dangerous. The justices rejected the government’s theory that anyone who regularly uses cannabis is dangerous enough to forfeit their Second Amendment protections.

Under the test the Court set in its 2022 Bruen decision, a government defending a gun restriction must show it is consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation. Philips’s lawyers argue Pennsylvania cannot meet that burden, contending that “historical tradition does not support permanently denying the right to bear arms” over a nonviolent marijuana offense from more than three decades ago.

They borrow Hemani’s reasoning that a sprawling drug statute is a weak proxy for dangerousness. Because Pennsylvania hangs the ban on any drug conviction, the complaint contends, the law fails to confine its reach “to those who are categorically and unusually dangerous.”

The challenge is deliberately narrow. The plaintiffs are not trying to arm people convicted of serious drug felonies, who are separately barred from owning firearms under state and federal law. They target only the provision that sweeps in minor possession offenses committed by people who otherwise remain eligible to own guns.

What to watch

The lawsuit asks the court to declare the carry-license ban unconstitutional, to block the state from enforcing it against people who can legally own firearms, and to order sheriffs to deny licenses only when there is individualized evidence that an applicant is dangerous. Gun Owners of America says it has other Pennsylvania members caught in the same bind over old, nonviolent drug convictions.

The case is an early test of whether Hemani’s logic, aimed at a federal statute, will carry over to the patchwork of state licensing laws that treat any drug conviction as permanently disqualifying. It also lands in a state that has yet to legalize adult-use marijuana even as neighbors move ahead – a debate Pennsylvania lawmakers have repeatedly stalled. Other states have taken the opposite tack on the gun question; Maryland, for one, has advanced legislation to protect gun rights for medical marijuana patients.

If Philips prevails, Pennsylvania sheriffs would lose the automatic drug-conviction denial and have to weigh carry applicants one at a time. And gun owners elsewhere, still locked out over decades-old possession charges, would have a template to challenge their own states’ rules.