When asked about whether drug users should be able to possess firearms in light of Hunter Biden’s lawyers apparently planning to use Second Amendment as defense if the first son is charged for buying a handgun while using crack cocaine, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre refused to comment.
“I’m not going to get into a tit for tat on this,” Jean-Pierre said during a press briefing. “I’m just not going to.”
The federal government currently prohibits drug users from owning guns, and reports have emerged that Biden purchased a handgun in 2018 while admitting to smoking crack cocaine “every 15 minutes” at that time. Interestingly, on the gun purchase form, Biden said he wasn’t a drug user.
At the same time, President Joe Biden and his administration have been calling for stricter gun control and bans, and they even defended a law that prohibits medical marijuana users from acquiring guns.
This comes as IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley is accusing the Justice Department of “slow-walking” the investigation into Hunter Biden’s finances. During an interview with CBS News, Shapley, a 14-year veteran of the agency, said: “There were multiple steps that were slow-walked — were just completely not done — at the direction of the Department of Justice. When I took control of this particular investigation, I immediately saw deviations from the normal process. It was way outside the norm of what I’ve experienced in the past.”
Federal law prohibits drug users from owning guns, but a Supreme Court ruling last year that essentially broadened Second Amendment protections puts that prohibition into question – and Biden’s lawyers could use the argument as part of his defense.
This scenario could put diametrically opposed foes – Biden and conservative Republicans – on the same side of trying to bolster pro-Second Amendment legal precedent.
First reported in Politico, Biden’s lawyers have already told DOJ officials that, if their client is charged with the gun crime, they will challenge the law under the Second Amendment, a person familiar told the publication.
When he bought the gun in 2018, Biden filled out a federal form on which he allegedly claimed that he was not “an unlawful user of, or addicted to” any “controlled substance,” Politico reported in 2021. However, according to Biden’s 2021 memoir, he frequently used crack cocaine at the time.
“I was smoking crack every 15 minutes,” he wrote.