As Hunter Biden’s lawyer notes, the standard laid out in Bruen is that any law that is “inconsistent with this nation’s historical tradition on firearm regulation” should be held to be presumptively unconstitutional. Because neither the Founding generation nor the Reconstruction generation imposed a total prohibition on drug users purchasing or possessing firearms, Hunter Biden’s team suggests, their client cannot be prosecuted for having refused to divulge his addiction when he bought a gun.
Historically, there have been many laws that temporarily governed possession of firearms — if, for example, you were obviously drunk, you could be disarmed — but there have been none that linked generalized drug use with the loss of the right to keep and bear arms. As such, Hunter Biden’s lawyers conclude, “asking about Mr. Biden’s status as a user of a controlled status is constitutionally irrelevant to whether he can be denied his Second Amendment right to gun ownership,” and the case must fall.
I think this argument is strong. But President Biden does not. As a matter of fact, Joe Biden thinks that the framework that made this defense possible “contradicts both common sense and the Constitution, and should deeply trouble us all.”
It is going to be extremely awkward for Joe Biden to see his son fighting a prosecution that has been brought by his own Department of Justice on legal grounds that he has argued make America less safe and ought to be reversed. It is going to be even more awkward if that case, Biden v. United States, ends up providing a key practical example of Bruen‘s scope. For decades, Joe Biden has been known in part for his enthusiasm for stricter gun-control and stricter drug laws. To have the joint at which the two meet weakened by his own son would be nothing short of bizarre.
— Charles C.W. Cooke in On Gun-Control, It’s Now Hunter Biden v. Joe Biden
