In a move running counter to the typical Mafia-style call for “loyalty” between father and son, the Hunter Biden defense team is leveraging recent US Circuit Court rulings that negate portions of a decades-old US gun-grab statute that Don Joe has loved for years.
The issue centers on federal “prosecutor” David Weiss’s recent grand jury indictments of Hunter that pertain to his possession of a firearm while admittedly being a crack cocaine user, and Biden’s lying on federal documents – his gun purchase and his background document for the federally “licensed” gun seller – regarding his drug use at the time.
Portions of the odious 1968 “Gun Control Act” label the possession and the false statement as “felonious” criminal actions, and would see any guilty verdicts against Hunter allowing a judge to sentence him to more than a decade in prison. But, two recent Circuit Court rulings have called into question the “drug user can’t have a gun” prohibition, and, as a result, also would call into question whether any lie Hunter made on a federal document about his use of drugs would become moot, as well.
The case that directly touches on possession by a drug user was decided in the Fifth US Circuit Court of Appeals on August 9. Entitled, “United States of America v Patrick Darnell Daniels, Jr.” the majority on the court found unconstitutional a portion of the 1968 “Gun Control Act” (Title 18 of the US Criminal Code) that allows government to punish a drug user for possessing a firearm.
Or, in the parlance of the court in its ruling:
“Title 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(3) bars an individual from possessing a firearm if he is
an ‘unlawful user’ of a controlled substance. Patrick Daniels is one such ‘unlawful user’ — he admitted to smoking marihuana multiple days per month.”
The Washington Examiner’s Kaelan Deese offered a valuable overview of the decision at the time:
“The case is known as U.S. v. Daniels, and the decision was written by Judge Jerry Smith, joined by Judges Stephen Higginson and Don Willett. Together they held the law violated the Second Amendment and did not align with the Supreme Court's test established in Bruen v. New York Rifle & Pistol Association, which established that firearms laws must conform with the nation's ‘historical tradition of firearm regulation.’”
And the history of how local governments tried to handle immediate problems presented by drunk people being put in jail for a brief period, versus people who owned guns, might have drinking problems, but were sober and out of jail, is pertinent the “Daniels” decision and for Hunter’s case:
"’Just as there was no historical justification for disarming a citizen of sound mind, there is no tradition that supports disarming a sober citizen who is not currently under an impairing influence,’ Smith (Fifth Circuit Judge Jerry Smith) wrote. ‘Indeed, it is helpful to compare the tradition surrounding the insane and the tradition surrounding the intoxicated side-by-side.’
The federal statute applied not only when a person is intoxicated but also when they are sober and in possession of a controlled substance.
The opinion goes on to suggest that the founders ‘institutionalized the insane and stripped them of their guns; but they allowed alcoholics to possess firearms while sober.’"
Along those lines, the 1968 Gun Control Act long has inspired logically-minded people to wonder how its authors could claim that a person who has been convicted of a felony, done his or her time, and been released, should be deemed safe enough to be in society, but, somehow, not safe enough to exercise his or her right to keep and bear arms. The question that pertains to Hunter Biden is, “Outside of a jail, how can one find his right to keep and bear arms further curtailed by the state?”
Related: Hunter Biden, Second Amendment Hero? | MRCTV
Simply put, that’s not supposed to happen.
Disregarding the huge constitutional problem of the feds prohibiting “controlled substances” without amending the Constitution the way they did to prohibit alcohol sales a century ago, the entirety of the 1968 “Gun Control Act” is an offense to both the Second Amendment and our inherent individual right to keep and bear arms.
And since the Fifth Circuit ruled in favor of Mr. Daniels, the court leaves room for Hunter’s team to block prosecution of Hunter for possessing a gun while being a “crack user.” It also allows Hunter’s defense lawyers to call into question the pair of indictments over him falsely answering questions about his drug use on gun purchase documents.
Simply put, if the original portion of the 1968 statute that pertains to “users of controlled substances” was unconstitutional, then any government requirements to supply information regarding use of the substances also would be unconstitutional and not require truthful answers.
As Zoe Tillman writes for Bloomberg, a June ruling in the Third US Circuit Court of Appeals addresses this question of falsely answering questions that the feds should not be asking in the first place.
“In June, the 3rd US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of a Pennsylvania man who was barred from having a gun because of a past conviction for making false statements in order to get food stamps. The majority of judges found that the government failed to show a ‘historical analogue’ that would justify stripping the man of his Second Amendment rights.
The 3rd Circuit covers Delaware, making that case especially relevant to any challenge that Hunter Biden raises, although it addressed a different section of federal law.”
Of course, since the finger-to-the-wind, whatever-sounds-good Joe Biden long ago flipped his previous skepticism that so-called “gun bans” would work, and he began adoring provisions of the 1968 Gun Control Act, this legal positioning by his son’s defense team pits Joe’s love of the act against his own son’s lawyers and his son’s prospects for freedom.
It's a situation worthy of a prime-time TV drama. But we all pay for it, through the taxes they make us cough up, and the potential that politicians like Joe will continue to salivate for taking more of our rights.
Could Hunter and his legal team turn out to be defenders of the right to keep and bear arms?
We shall see…
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— MRCTV (@mrctv) September 17, 2023