As the body count from gun violence grows and grows, a plea deal will allow the president’s son to escape prosecution for violating a federal law that prohibits illegal drug users from possessing firearms.
At the same time, the same Department of Justice is trying to show us how serious it is about guns by fighting to reinstate an identical firearms charge against a 32-year-old Texas woman that a federal judge in that state dismissed.
Hunter Biden was allegedly a crack user in 2018, when he purchased a gun. The woman in the other case, Paola Connelly, is said to have told police who recovered her gun in 2021 that she “only sometimes smoked weed in order to go to sleep at night,” according to court papers
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Biden and Connelly are both said to have responded “no” to a question on a federal firearms purchase form that asks, “Are you an unlawful user of, or addicted to, marijuana or any depressant, stimulant, narcotic drug, or any other controlled substance?”
Both were charged with violating 18 U.S.C. §Section 922(g)(3) for “possession of a firearm by an unlawful user of a controlled substance.” The gun in Biden’s case was a .38 caliber revolver he bought at a Wilmington, Delaware, gun shop. Connelly’s weapon was a Glock Model 43X, which she purchased on Dec. 11, 2020. Police discovered it stashed between a mattress and a bed stand after responding to a 911 call involving her husband, John, and another person.
Back in May, Hunter Biden’s legal team suggested it would seek to have the firearms charge against him dismissed in light of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen. The June 2022 decision written by Justice Clarence Thomas gutted a New York State gun-control law dating back to 1911. President Biden declared that the high court’s ruling “contradicts both common sense and the Constitution, and should deeply trouble us all.”
The Bruen decision prompted the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to rule in U.S. v. Rahimi that the government cannot just bar those accused of domestic violence from possessing firearms. And that, in turn, prompted Paola Connelly’s attorney, Mary Stillinger, to renew a failed motion to have the indictment dismissed on the grounds that it violated the Second Amendment and deprived her client of due process.
In light of Rahimi, U.S. District Court Judge Kathleen Cardone found a pot smoker such as Connelly is, in fact, protected by the Second Amendment.
“The historical tradition of disarming ‘unlawful’ individuals appears to mainly involve disarming those convicted of serious crimes after they have been afforded criminal process,” Judge Cardone noted. “Section 922(g)(3), in contrast, disarms those who engage in criminal conduct that would give rise to misdemeanor charges, without affording them the procedural protections enshrined in our criminal justice system.”
She was not impressed by the federal government citing a 1655 law in colonial Virginia that prohibited “shoot[ing] any gunns at drinking (marriages and ffunerals onely excepted.” She noted that the Virginia’s provision’s main concern was that the colonizers depended on gunshots to alert them of an attack by Native Americans. The provision further sought to guard against the ”beastly vice [of] spending much [gun]powder in vain, that might be reserved against the common enemie.”
“The Virginia law prevented individuals from using firearms while actively intoxicated, while § 922(g)(3) prevents users of intoxicants from possessing firearms altogether,” Carbone wrote.
On April 26, Carbone dismissed the case against Connelly.
But the Department of Justice was not done with Connelly. Jaime Esparza, the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Texas, filed a notice of appeal with the Fifth District on May 4.
Had the Justice Department played let’s-not-make-a-deal with Biden as it has with Connelly, his lawyers would have been remiss not to also seek a dismissal on grounds derived from Bruen, the Supreme Court decision that provoked such outrage from his dad.
As it is, Hunter Biden is losing an opportunity to do something actually good for once. Had he entered a guilty plea to the gun charges along with a pair of tax violations without making a deal and done a little time in prison, he might have underscored that gun laws should apply to everybody. He instead worked it out so the gun charge will be dropped if he behaves as he should have all along.
The U.S. attorney’s office in Texas did not respond to a request for comment on the Connelly case. Nor did Connelly’s attorney. Connelly herself said she wanted to check with her attorney before commenting. She suggested that it was not a good time anyway to discuss how she and Hunter Biden are being treated so differently in gun cases where the only significant disparities are that he was a full-blown crack addict and and she just toked a little pot at night.
“I’m at work,” she said.
