This is not a political blog. But two issues that widely separate what the press so freely describes as the “right” and the “left” illustrate how often we fail to pause and evaluate how punitive laws affect American families. This is especially true in the context of “divided” families where parents vehemently disagree about guns and abortion.
It’s a family issue because in Montgomery County last week a 16 year old employed a ghost gun to murder his 15 year old neighbor. Kids with guns are a danger to all of us in a country where we have 1.5 guns per citizen. Abortion is a family issue as well especially if your otherwise endearing 8th grader informs you that she missed her period.
The U.S. Supreme Court took on the gun issue on June 18 in U.S. v. Hermani. The headlines on this implied the Court was endorsing the idea that the pothead who lives next door has a 2nd Amendment right to wave his gun around while high. That’s not what occurred and it’s best illustrated by the fact that the opinion of the court was unanimous in the sense all nine concurred in the result.
First the facts. Mr. Hermani was at home in 2022 when visited by FBI agents holding a search warrant. They found a Glock pistol, 60 grams of marijuana and 4.7 grams of cocaine. Aside from the coke, pause to think about how many of your friends and family might have a gun and some dope when the FBI stops to visit them. There’s a federal law that governs all of us. 18 U.S.C. 922 makes it a felony for any person who is an unlawful user of, or addicted to, any controlled substance to possess, … firearms or ammunition.”
Mr. Hermani lives in Texas and that may have had something to do with this prosecution. But the U.S. Attorneys in Pennsylvania operate under the same laws meaning that your legal Glock and 60 grams of weed could change where you spend 20% of your life. What the Supreme Court said was that these federal laws were not constitutional as applied to folks like Mr. Hermani. It didn’t endorse his Glock, his weed or his coke as a lifestyle although his Glock has 2nd Amendment protection. But people should not be incarcerated for years because they have a gun and controlled substances in their dwelling without further clarification of the policy the law wants to enforce.
Now we turn to another red-hot controversy. Your teenager who may be pregnant. Until the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health four years ago, this was a “family” decision. Now in 13 states, termination of a pregnancy is a crime at the outset and in six other states, it becomes a crime after a prescribed number of weeks following conception. In a curious turn, most of these laws don’t target the person seeking the abortion. It’s the physician they consult and who prescribes an abortifacient or otherwise terminates the pregnancy who is identified as the perp. The penalty to the physician is a decade or more in jail. Today the fight is over whether physicians in states where abortion is legal are committing a crime if they prescribe an abortifacient to a person living in a state where abortion is illegal. In addition, there is reporting about physicians deferring or refusing to terminate ectopic and other potentially life-threatening pregnancies out of fear that law enforcement may second guess their assessment-making the abortion a crime.
Physicians are handsomely paid in America, but they rarely make any real income until almost 30 years of age. The cost of medical training is clocking in at about $300,000 today. Faced with a variety of specialty practices, how many would choose one where the malpractice premiums are easily $50,000 a year and you have a shot at spending a decade in prison? Today nearly 50% of counties in the U.S. have no formally trained obstetrician/gynecologist. That puts all unborn children at risk at a time when it seems clear that we should be encouraging children and wanting them born in healthy ways.
Under the common law of England and later in the early United States, abortion was not considered a crime before quickening (when the fetus could be felt to move). Prior to that point, terminating a pregnancy was seen as restoring menses rather than killing a person. After quickening, however, the fetus was regarded as a living being with a legally protected right to life — a concept William Blackstone described as “inherent by nature in every individual. Meanwhile, the crime of aborting a quickened child was very rarely prosecuted. In a day of huge infant mortality and a stunning rate of maternal death caused by childbirth people had other things to focus on. I reference this because the gun cases from the Supreme Court continue to take us back to the common law and adoption of the Constitution.
Whether we need guns in a day when my Amazon delivered drone might be used to blow up my unworthy neighbor is a difficult topic. But with a fast-declining birth rate and 10% of all women struggling with fertility, we should agree we would benefit from more children. There are better ways to encourage children and discourage abortion than threatening health care providers with jail. And while I’m not happy that my neighbor who smokes weed has a collection of automatic weapons, his imprisonment at taxpayer expense averaging $200 a day also seems extreme. We need laws that discourage rather than weaponize conduct we don’t like but which pose no immediate threat to us now residing on planet Earth.
Here’s the case: 24-1234 United States v. Hemani (06/18/2026)