The Brief

Unlike its New York origin story, no one can really say exactly when hip-hop hit the West Coast. But when it did, Alonzo Williams was there.

Known as the “godfather” of West Coast hip-hop, Williams has been working in the music industry here for more than 40 years. He’s been a DJ, music producer, former club owner, and member of the World Class Wreckin’ Cru with Dr. Dre, DJ Yella and artists like Michel'le.

His studio in Gardena is where West Coast hip-hop history was made.

An award for NWA's "Straight Outta Compton" album hangs in Alonzo Williams' studio.

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Alonzo "Lonzo" Williams, the Godfather of West Coast Hip-Hop, in his home studio.

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“This house is like the Motown House of West Coast hip-hop,” Williams says, recalling the first moments he recorded with collaborators. “It could be haunted with music.”

This is where Williams made the first Wreckin’ Cru record, the electro-funk group credited for pioneering West Coast hip-hop. He also recorded and produced hits for Dr. Dre and other hip-hop legends like Ice Cube and Eazy-E here.

“I wasn't trying to be the godfather,” Williams says, “I just was doing me.”

The studio’s musical history goes way back to when before hip-hop existed. Before Williams, it was previously owned by Johnny Otis — a singer, composer and record producer known as the “godfather” of rhythm and blues in the late '40s and '50s. Jazz icon Etta James, a mutual friend who lived right next door, also recorded much of her generation-defining music right there.

Disco and funk set the scene

It all started with disco.

“In the beginning it was all about partying,” Williams says. “It was all about dancing, it was all about having a good time.”

He recalls growing up in Compton and falling in love with the dance and club scene through his high school dances. “We didn’t have a lot of the luxuries kids have today, but it was a much better time,” he recalls.

Influenced by the disco groove, he later became a local DJ known as Disco Lonzo.

At the same time, the musical variety show Soul Train was blowing up in L.A., which featured Black musicians and dancers from L.A. (It first began to broadcast from Chicago, then moved here in 1971 when it was syndicated.)

“The show really made an opportunity for not only Black artists to get their music out, but for a presentation of Black dance and expression that the world had really never seen,” says historian of Black culture and museum curator Tyree Boyd-Pates.

“This is what I grew up on,” Wiliams says. “It was just an all around good time.”

Alonzo "Lonzo" Williams, the Godfather of West Coast Hip-Hop, in his home studio.

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Alonzo "Lonzo" Williams, the Godfather of West Coast Hip-Hop, in his home studio.

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But disco — known to be popular among queer, Latino and Black communities — died down toward the late '70s, due, many will argue today, to nationwide racism and homophobia.

The end was most visible in 1979, at Chicago’s Comiskey Park’s “Disco Demolition” night. That night, in a baseball promotion gone wrong, a popular DJ well known for being an anti-disco “discophobe” blew up disco records at a scheduled White Sox game. Hordes of people showed up, chaos ensued and the White Sox had to forfeit the game. Historical observers of that night are split about what exactly went down — some still view it a badly mishandled attempt to get people to the game while others saw it as a symbolic rejection of the genre and its supposed representation of queer culture.

But soon, a new kind of sound began to take the L.A. club scene by storm: funk music. Bands like KC and the Sunshine Band, The Sugarhill Gang and Brass Construction became the soundtrack at the hottest nightclubs.

Williams, who had recently opened the nightclub Eve After Dark in Compton, says funk, more so than disco, was truly the sound of L.A.’s Black community. “It was the sound of the young urban Blacks of the 70s,” Williams says. “Disco was cool, but it wasn't ours.”

Funk became the foundation for what would become the West Coast sound of a brand new genre that was, like disco, all about rhythm and movement.

“Funk is very repetitive,” Williams says. “It does the same thing every four bars for the most part, like James Brown is the master of repetition … He takes you high and brings you back down for the same 16 bars.”

Along with the advent of mechanical drum machines, funk’s repetition paved the way for the idea of sampling, reusing a portion of a song under a hip-hop beat, and ultimately, the West Coast hip-hop sound: “It became the basis of hip hop,” Williams says. “You could sit there and tap and make drum sounds. You can get a keyboard and sample, you could do almost anything.”

World Class Wreckin’ Cru

Playing around with funk samples, drum beats and flows in Williams’ studio soon became The World Class Wreckin' Cru — the first West Coast hip-hop group to be signed by a major label in 1983. Williams formed the group and brought in Dr. Dre, DJ Yella and Michel’le.

“We just took the elements that we'd already had, and basically rap was nothing but poetry to a beat,” he says.

Members of the World Class Wreckin' Cru — Alonzo Williams is at far right.

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Considered the first West Coast hip-hop group, but technically “electro-funk,” Wreckin’ Cru was the first group on the coast to rap over a sampled beat, to create what is now the distinctive West Coast sound. Williams says these specific ingredients — the rapping, the sampling, the drum machines — opened the door for many Black people with a story to tell to express themselves with music.

“Growing up in Compton, I always wanted to be a Temptation,” Williams recalls, laughing. “I knew I couldn’t sing, but I could write.”

Roots in revolution 

Beyond the influences of disco and funk, Williams emphasizes the true origins of hip-hop go back far before the inception of those genres. It’s all about storytelling, he says.

Black Americans have used spoken word over music to tell stories from their community for centuries. Tracing it back to the 1800s, Williams refers to the songs enslaved Black people would sing in the fields on the plantations as a tool to both process and communicate their experiences.

“All those stories of people's lives that were put to music,” he says. “Hip-hop is just another vehicle used to tell the stories of our community.”

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“Hip-hop, especially in the West Coast, is rooted in revolution,” Boyd-Pates says, nodding to the influence of poetry and spoken word among L.A.’s Black population during the 1965 Watts Rebellion.

Groups like the Last Poets in New York and the Watts Prophets in L.A. rose out of the Civil Rights movement to fuse the sounds of jazz and funk and spoken word to chronicle Black life in America, Boyd-Pates says. A 1965 radio broadcast by the Afro-American Association featured Black voices set to a beat, documenting the Watts Rebellion. It was titled: The Uncensored Version of The Los Angeles Riots.

“You’re gunna hear an analysis of Los Angeles that you won’t hear on the news,” one of the speakers says. “Los Angeles, it’s not a riot, it’s a war.”

“They used their poems and their words accompanied with sound to serve as a clarion call to Black conditioning here, particularly in South Los Angeles,” Boyd-Pates says of the artists of that time.

That gave rise to what came to define hip-hop and rap in its early days — the work of Dr. Dre, Eazy-E and NWA and albums like Straight Outta Compton. “It gave the whole world, especially through gangsta rap of the 1990s, a journalistic view of what it meant to be Black in L.A.,” Boyd-Pates says. “And you had movies like Boyz n the Hood that paralleled that same experience.”

Enter: Gangsta rap

This West Coast hip-hop renaissance lasted a few years, giving rise to regional giants like Dr. Dre, Eazy-E, Ice Cube, Ice-T and Snoop Dogg — “it was the golden age of hip-hop,” Williams says. “We were partying on the weekend and in the studio during the week.”

But then — much due to crack cocaine and other drugs hitting the streets on L.A. — the texture of the scene drastically changed.

Eazy-E photographed on Feb. 12, 1989.

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“It was basically overnight,” Williams explains. “Suddenly everyone was a gangster, and you could hear it in the music.”

Lyrically, as the music shifted from love, romance and dance to a much more explicit tone of gun violence, drugs and sex, so did the energy at the clubs and in the streets, Williams says. This was the era that belonged to NWA, Tupac, Too Short; East Coast v. West Coast beef hit a high point (though many say this was purposely stoked by the media).

“Gangster rap killed electro funk,” Williams says, “The dance floor was no longer an option.”

Though this was a troubling time for the hip-hop scene in general — that included the shooting murders of hip-hop legends Tupac and Biggie Smalls — gangster rap was an influential musical element to the development of not just the genre, but hip-hop’s service for the journalism and preservation of Black culture in America.

Ice Cube performs with N.W.A. at Anaheim's Celebrity Theater on March 27, 1989.

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“The music industry changed after Dr. Dre dropped The Chronic,” says Boyd-Pates. “The industry was never the same and gangsta rap was ushering in Death Row Records, Snoop Doggy Dogg and naturally Tupac who took it to heights the world had never seen … and all of that has ties to L.A.’s culture at large, especially Black culture.”

West Coast hip-hop forever 

Today’s L.A. legends like Kendrick Lamar and Nipsey Hussle, Tyler the Creator, Inglewood Sir, each carry forth the elements of this West Coast sound. You can hear its collective history — the disco, the funk, soul, gospel, and gangster rap — in music today.

Hip-hop may have started in New York years before it really reached L.A., and the East Coast sound may have reigned in the beginning. But the hip-hop sound established here was its own. It made an impression and it persisted, Williams notes.

“One thing about L.A. that made L.A. so great in so many ways is that it was spread out,” says Williams. “L.A. County is huge and everyone wanted their own recognition so when Compton made its stamp on hip-hop, Long Beach had to follow, Pomona had to follow, Inglewood followed and it created a competition but helped anchor the West.”

“Then Northern California did their thing,” Williams adds, “and just between California alone you gotta a whole lotta hip-hop. And most of it sounds totally different. That is the beauty of the West Coast.”

L.A. city leaders will discuss on Wednesday whether to pull hundreds of millions of dollars out of the regional homelessness agency and assign different oversight.

L.A. County supervisors voted to withdraw funding for the L.A. Homeless Services Authority last April, citing ongoing problems with the agency's oversight of homelessness funds.

Now 10 months later, City Council members are planning to talk about whether to pull the city’s funds from LAHSA — which amount to just under $300 million this fiscal year.

It’s one of the most consequential decisions on homelessness city officials have faced in years. In deciding the future of LAHSA, the City Council will be deciding who will be entrusted with taxpayer funds meant to address the nation’s largest unsheltered homeless population.

What the council will discuss

On Wednesday, the council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee is scheduled to discuss a range of options that include:

• not changing anything major
• keeping the city money at LAHSA, but beefing up city oversight
• shifting the funding from LAHSA to direct city control
• shifting the city’s funding from LAHSA to the county homelessness department to administer it

The committee also is scheduled to discuss whether to pursue shifting the city’s federal homelessness funding from LAHSA to more direct city control.

The options were first laid out in a staff report to delivered last April, two years after it was requested by Councilmember Monica Rodriguez.

At a City Council meeting in January, Rodriguez criticized housing and homelessness committee chair Nithya Raman for not scheduling a committee discussion on the options.

“It's been sitting [for] 280 days, a report in your committee that you won't hear,” Rodriguez said at the January meeting. “So let's stop playing this false notion of the arsonists showing up as the firefighters.”

Asked for a response Monday, Raman’s spokesperson Stella Stahl told LAist the item is on Wednesday's agenda.

In a statement, Raman said she expects to hold two meetings to discuss all the city’s options before the council makes a decision.

Raman and Mayor Karen Bass urged the county not to pull funding from LAHSA last spring, saying the agency was making progress on homelessness.

The supervisors went ahead last April with their decision to withdraw the more than $300 million in annual county funding from the agency.

The vast majority of county funds will be shifted from LAHSA starting July 1.

Raman recently announced she’s running in the June primary against Bass, whom she previously endorsed for re-election.

LAHSA is in ‘crisis,’ its CEO says

LAHSA was created by the city and county in 1993 to oversee homeless services. It’s governed by a CEO who reports to a commission of 10 members. Half of the members are appointed by the L.A. mayor, and the other half by each of the five county supervisors. Bass also serves on the commission, having appointed herself in fall 2023.

While it’s long faced criticism, it’s been under particularly close scrutiny for more than a year.

An audit and court-ordered review found it failed to properly track its spending and whether services were being provided.

LAHSA also has been facing criticism more recently for months-long delays in paying tens of millions of dollars to reimburse service providers — a problem officials vowed to fix nearly two years ago. Several providers recently told LAist they've had had to dip into reserves or take on debt.

While addressing the commission that oversees the organization on Friday, CEO O’Neill said LAHSA was “in crisis. And I say this not as a criticism to any of our really hardworking staff. They've built what they were asked to build.”

LAHSA’s staff report to “essentially 21 elected bosses, all of whom have different, sometimes conflicting agendas,” O’Neill said. “This creates a structure that is unstable.”

“LAHSA has been structured for decades as the entity that takes the blame,” she added. “Political incentive…has been to point at LAHSA rather than to address structural issues.”

“Morale is very low,” O’Neill said of LAHSA staff.

Fifteen years ago, when modern electric vehicles were just hitting the road, no one knew exactly what to expect from their giant, expensive lithium-ion batteries.

As batteries age, they hold less and less energy. Anyone who's ever had a dying smartphone, or had to replace a vehicle's 12-volt starter battery, knows this painfully well.

EV batteries were intended to last longer than those smaller, cheaper batteries. But how much longer?

The predictions were not soothing. In 2010, the New York Times wrote that "estimates of [EV] battery packs' lifespan — no one knows for sure — range upward from seven years." The average car on the road is more than 12 years old. And that discrepancy made some would-be EV buyers nervous.

Batteries come with warranties, but they don't last as long as the car. If a high-voltage battery chokes out midway through a car's life, it needs replacing — at a price tag that can run in the ballpark of $5,000 to $20,000.

But there's good news.

As the fleet of EVs on the road ages, new data pooled from tens of thousands of vehicles is showing those batteries are lasting longer than expected.

How a battery ages 

Lithium-ion batteries undergo two kinds of aging. First, there's calendar aging: They degrade as time goes on, holding less juice, even if they just sit in storage.

Then there's cyclical aging, which is how much a battery degrades based on its use — being charged and discharged, over and over again.

That means there's no way to dodge degradation. Whether you use a vehicle a lot or a little, eventually, the battery will hold less energy.

But the trajectory of aging isn't a straight line. Recurrent, a research firm that pulls in data from over 30,000 EV drivers, describes it as an "S curve." There's a rapid decline at the beginning, a long leveling off, and then a more rapid decline at the end.

"It's very much like breaking in a pair of shoes," says Liz Najman, the director of market insights at Recurrent. The shoes start out stiff, but quickly get a little more give. "And then your shoes just last you," she says, until at some point, "It's all over, it's a rapid decline."

And when it comes to EV batteries, two things are becoming clear. The initial drop-off is not as severe as some people had worried. And the sharp end-of-life decline is taking a long, long time to materialize.

At auto auctions, a lot of healthy batteries

Adam George is a vehicle services director at Cox Automotive, which runs used car auctions around the country. In recent years, the number of used EVs for sale has increased enormously — reflecting the sharp rise in production a few years ago.

That's given Cox Automotive a growing pool of used EVs to evaluate before they're re-sold.

"We were expecting battery health to be experiencing mass degradation over the first one to three years of owning a vehicle," George says. "What we have seen, though, is that these 2, 3, 4-year-old off-lease cars that are coming back have battery health scores well upwards of 95%."

Recurrent's data also shows that cars from most major brands retain 95% or more of their expected range after 3 years, thanks in part to software and battery management systems that are designed to correct for the battery's early degradation, and give drivers consistent range.

So the initial drop-off in that S curve is in the range of 5% or so, give or take. After that? Well, Cox Automotive has tested nearly 80,000 EVs, and found an average battery health of 92%.

Decade-old EVs are overwhelmingly on their original batteries 

That data set is naturally skewed toward younger vehicles, because the vast majority of EVs on the road today are fairly new. There were only a million EVs sold between 2010 and 2018, and now there are more than a million sold each year.

So what about the oldest EVs, specifically?

Recurrent's data can help answer this question. Najman, a data scientist, notes a few caveats: It's a fairly small dataset, just because there weren't many EVs built more than a decade ago. And some of the oldest EVs use technology that can't connect to Recurrent's opt-in network.

But based on their community, among EVs that are 10 years old or older, only 8.5% have ever had a battery replacement. More than 90% of them are still on their original battery.

"EV batteries are holding up phenomenally well," Najman says.  

Recurrent has also looked at EVs of any age that have more than 150,000 miles on them, which provides a closer look at the effects of that cyclical aging. There, too, the batteries outperformed expectations.

"Cars with 150,000 miles or more, and that have not had battery replacements, are getting at least 83% of their original range," Najman says.

Now, there is one common reason why EV batteries will be replaced very early on: a defect. There have been multiple large-scale battery recalls, and any individual battery might have a flaw that requires replacement. But because all new EVs come with warranties, that kind of replacement isn't a financial blow to owners.

"That would be something that would be synonymous with, like, your engine or a transmission going bad," says Adam George, of Cox Automotive. "That's what warranties are for."

EV battery warranties typically cover at least 8 years and 100,000 miles, and automakers will replace the battery in the case of catastrophic failure, or a reduction in capacity (usually to 70% of the original or less).

A robotic arm displays the dual engine chassis of a Model S electric sedan at the Hawthorne Airport in Los Angeles on October 9, 2014.

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The tale of one Model S 

What do all these stats look like in real life? Consider Norman Hajjar's Model S.

Hajjar was an early adopter of electric vehicles. He kind of had to be: In 2013 he became an executive at the electric vehicle drivers' app Plugshare.

His 2012 Model S is one of the first that Tesla ever built. When he got it, he was well aware of the question mark about battery lifespan. "There was really no way of knowing what the future held for it because there was zero track record," Hajjar says.

In his case, the future held a battery defect: a loud noise followed by his car coming to an abrupt stop. He recalls Tesla replacing the battery — free of charge and under warranty — in 2014.

Since then, he's spent 12 years on that second battery. He's put around 200,000 miles on the car overall. And it's driving great, thank you very much.

"This vehicle still is a monster," Hajjar says, affectionately. "It is extremely fast, quick off the line."

The vehicle was originally rated to have 265 miles of range. Now it has about 220. Do the math, and it's at 83% of its original capacity. "The amount of degradation is pretty minor," Hajjar says.

Hajjar has moved on to a newer vehicle for his daily driver, mostly to enjoy higher-tech features. (His newer Model Y has Tesla's advanced driver-assistance software.) His son uses the Model S these days for his commute to college. "It's just sort of a backup vehicle now," Hajjar says. But he plans to hang on to it. He's sentimental about it, he says.

Why are batteries outlasting expectations? 

The engineers who developed modern EVs knew that prolonging battery life would be crucial. They designed systems to actively manage temperatures to improve battery lifespan, and software to constantly check battery health. Years have shown those efforts paid off.

But there's another reason EV batteries have out-performed expectations. It turns out that testing batteries is harder on them than the real world. Their lifespan was underestimated.

Simona Onori's lab at Stanford University has done research into the longevity of lithium-ion batteries, including a 2024 paper in Nature Energy showing that traditional methods for testing battery life are very stressful, and don't match the way batteries are actually used.

In most lab tests, researchers repeatedly cycle them from a very high state of charge to a very low one.

Real-world driving is gentler, with stops and starts — each start draws a bit of the battery's energy down, while each stop gives it a little time to recharge. A driver would never slam the accelerator to the floor and keep it there until the battery is dead.

"We accelerate, we decelerate," Onori says. "The battery will be charged, and discharged, some rest if you're at a traffic light."

Her lab's findings suggest that the traditional tests for battery life were unrealistically challenging, and Onori says ongoing work with real-world data is now confirming that. When they're actually driven, she says, EV batteries "age gracefully. Very gracefully."

Just like humans, she notes: "When we live a life with less stress, we live longer."

A decade plus … and counting 

So how long do EV batteries last? It's still too soon to put a precise number on it, because — as a group — the cars already on the road haven't yet reached the end of the S-curve, the point when they will start to show massive performance declines. In other words, they're not dead yet.

Meanwhile, battery technology keeps improving. The oldest EVs, like Hajjar's Model S, may not be the best indicator of how long newer EVs will last. Software systems to manage batteries have gotten more sophisticated. A lot of new EVs use a different battery chemistry — lithium iron phosphate or LFP — which lasts even longer than other lithium-ion batteries.

As Stephanie Valdez-Streaty, who follows EV trends for Cox Automotive, puts it: "These batteries are built to outlast the cars."

And there's one more wrinkle when it comes to figuring out the end of life for a normally-aging EV battery. They don't die abruptly, like an old engine cutting out. It's more that their range shrinks; they can only hold enough energy for shorter and shorter trips. Instead of shelling out for an expensive battery replacement, some EV owners might just put up with that limitation.

Thomas McVeigh, of Ontario, Canada, drives a 2014 BMW i3. That vehicle didn't have an impressive range even when it was new, and now it can only manage about 55 miles on a single charge in the winter. But it still looks great. It's pleasant to drive. It saves him on gas. Maintenance is wildly cheap for a 12-year-old vehicle, and especially for a BMW; his only real cost is new tires.

He's fine with its diminished range. And he's not inclined to put what he estimates would be a $6,000 battery into an aging car. Instead, maybe he'll pass it on to his kid. "Teenagers generally aren't going for long drives," he says.

Or maybe he'll keep it for himself, after all. "I mean," he says, "I love that car."

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This week the Getty Villa Museum will begin offering a rare look at scrolls from its ancient Egyptian “Book of the Dead” collection.

The collection of 19 manuscripts written on scrolls of papyrus and linen fragments are fragile, with one of them dating back nearly 3,500 years. Because of that, the materials are not usually on display to the public and the gallery will be carefully lit, temperature and humidity-controlled.

Sara Cole, associate curator of antiquities, told LAist that a lot of the language in the spells is written in first person speech for the deceased spirit to say while navigating the afterlife.

“One of my favorite phrases that I have on a wall of the gallery is ‘May I join with the stars that call out to me in the night boat,’” Cole said.

Cole explained that the manuscripts have been in the Getty’s collection since 1983, when they were donated by a bookseller in New York, who got them from the private collection of a British rare manuscript collector.

Egyptian mummy wrapping of Petosiris, Son of Tetosiris, from around 332–100 BCE.

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A years-long project is underway to translate the spells and rituals immortalized in the Getty's “Book of the Dead” scrolls and fragments, with a “large publication” in the works, Cole said.

The exhibition will feature four papyri belonging to women named Webennesre, Ankhesenaset, and Aset. Cole said “Book of the Dead” materials belonging to women are rare, because most were reserved for men.

Twelve of the manuscripts in the exhibition are written on fragments of linen that were used to wrap the mummified remains of the people they belonged to. Cole said she hopes visitors will understand that the material was very intimately associated with peoples’ burials.

Cole said her goal is to foreground the identities of the people who owned the scrolls, including two women who were ritual singers for the god Amun in the ancient city of Thebes.

“We see in these manuscripts the ancient Egyptians really grappling with this question and thinking about what might happen when we die... And I think that’s something we can all connect with and understand,” she said.

Cole recommends visiting the Getty’s website for a calendar of curator tours and special events related to the exhibition, including an upcoming talk by an Egyptologist.

The “The Egyptian Book of the Dead” at the Getty Villa runs from March 4 to Nov. 30.

The Supreme Court hears arguments Monday in an important gun case that has united an array of strange bedfellows, from conservative gun rights groups to liberal civil liberties groups. At issue is a federal law making it a crime for drug users to possess a firearm. It's the same law that was used to prosecute then-President Joe Biden's son for illegal gun possession — only this case involves marijuana use and gun ownership.

The briefs in the case present diametrically different versions of the facts. On one side, the Trump administration portrays Ali Danial Hemani as a drug dealer and someone with terrorist ties and a marijuana habit. Importantly, he is not being prosecuted for any of those offenses, however. Rather, the government has charged Hemani with violating a federal gun law that bars people with drug addiction from possession of firearms, a crime punishable by up to 15 years in prison.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals threw out the indictment, declaring that the federal law violates Hemani's Second Amendment right to own a gun.

The Justice Department appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing that because Hemani admitted to FBI agents that he used marijuana several times a week, he is a "persistent" drug user, thus rendering illegal the possession of the gun he bought legally and keeps securely in his home.

Hemani's lawyer, law professor Naz Ahmad of the City University of New York, paints a very different picture of her client. Hemani, she notes, was born and raised in Texas, "attended high school there, played on the high school football team, attended the University of Texas at Arlington, was an honor student there" and is "a really valued member of his local religious community."

"The Second Amendment doesn't support disarming and prosecuting somebody for mere possession of a firearm if they happen to have used marijuana occasionally," she says.

"That's a mismatch," she adds, especially at a time when 40 states, to one degree or another, have legalized marijuana use.
 
If the court rules against Hemani, she says, "the statute could apply to anybody. It could apply to somebody who uses like a marijuana sleep gummy."

The Trump administration's advocate, Solicitor General D. John Sauer, acknowledges that under the Supreme Court's landmark gun decision four years ago, the government has a heavy burden to show that modern-day gun laws are analogous to laws in place at the nation's founding. But he contends that the statute used to prosecute Hemani is both justified and analogous to founding-era laws and practices.

Specifically, in his Supreme Court brief, Sauer points to the harsh punishments imposed during the founding era on "habitual drunkards." And he contends that both Congress and the states have restricted firearm possession by illegal drug users "for as long as that social evil has plagued America."

That said, for the most part, the case seems to have united groups from left to right, from civil liberties groups to gun rights advocates.

"It's outrageous that they tried to get him on a marijuana gun charge," says Aidan Johnston, director of federal affairs for Gun Owners of America. He contends that the government is seeking to criminalize conduct that was widely tolerated at the founding.

"It was the universal custom of founding-era militias to imbibe," he notes, adding that Thomas Jefferson and other famous Americans "possessed firearms while being users of drugs ranging from opium to cocaine."

At the opposite end of the ideological spectrum are a variety of gun-safety groups that fear that if Hemani wins his case, it could gouge a hole in the existing system of national background checks.

Under the current system, dealers are required to first clear the sale by submitting the buyer's name to the FBI's National Instant Criminal Background Check System. The hitch is that there is a very small window in which to complete the check — just three days. And gun-safety groups say that anything that makes the rules more complicated and unclear could really screw up the system.

"We're saying" to the court, "whatever you do, it's essential that you keep the rules clear so that in that short window, federal agencies can give a quick answer to the dealers," says Douglas Letter of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence. 

An adverse ruling, he says, would mess up the criminal background check process. That, in turn, would result in "so many, particularly women and children, who will die if that kind of a system is not in place."

A decision in the case is expected by summer.
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