Awkward: Hunter Biden’s Defense Invokes Gun Rights Ruling 19 Times After Joe Called It Unconstitutional
President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, is relying on Second Amendment arguments that his father once slammed as “deeply” troubling to escape conviction on gun crimes.
On Monday, attorneys for the president’s son filed a series of motions to dismiss federal charges handed down by Special Counsel David Weiss. Among the charges Biden’s attorneys want thrown out are firearm charges that were filed on the basis of Hunter Biden purchasing a gun as a drug addict. Hunter Biden’s initial sweetheart plea agreement — which was derailed this summer after it fell apart in court — would have forgiven the felony firearm conviction if Hunter maintained 24 months of sobriety.
“Hunter Biden asserts that the gun charges fail as a matter of constitutional law because Congress could not criminalize the possession of a gun by an addict,” explained Federalist Legal Correspondent Margot Cleveland. “And since Congress could not criminalize possession by an addict, it also could not make lying about being an addict a crime. Therefore, Hunter Biden argues the three gun charges fail.”
Hunter Biden’s attorneys cited United States v. Daniels, a 5th Circuit decision in August that reversed the firearm conviction of a non-violent drug user.
“In short, our history and tradition may support some limits on an intoxicated person’s right to carry a weapon, but it does not justify disarming a sober citizen based exclusively on his past drug usage,” the court ruled. “Nor do more generalized traditions of disarming dangerous persons support this restriction on nonviolent drug users.”
“The prosecution charges that Mr. Biden violated a rarely used statute that it claims prevented him from owning a firearm as an unlawful user of a controlled substance,” Hunter Biden’s lawyers wrote in their Monday motion. “But that statute’s status-based prohibition on gun ownership recently was struck down as unconstitutional under the Second Amendment.”
The Daniels decision followed the Supreme Court’s decision in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen, a landmark ruling in 2022 that broadly upheld the right to carry a handgun in public.
In another gun rights case that followed Bruen, attorneys for an Oklahoma man who was pulled over with a gun and marijuana in his car “argued the portion of federal firearms law focused on drug users or addicts was not consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation, echoing what the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled last year” in Bruen.
Attorneys for Hunter Biden cited the Supreme Court’s decision in Bruen 19 times in their motion filed on Monday. And yet, when the court handed down the landmark case in June 2022, President Biden said the “ruling contradicts both common sense and the Constitution, and should deeply trouble us all.”
Now, Hunter’s case may further strengthen the Second Amendment protections his father disparaged.
[RELATED: Please Let Hunter Biden Help Overturn Our Unjust And Unconstitutional Gun Laws]
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