On December 1, 2023, after a bench trial in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Iowa, Alexander Ledvina was convicted of violating a federal law that bars illegal drug users from owning guns. Exactly a year later, President Joe Biden, whose administration had zealously defended that law in court, pardoned his son, Hunter Biden, for committing the same crime.

Ledvina, a marijuana user who was 26 when he was arrested, was sentenced to four years and three months in federal prison. Hunter Biden, a middle-aged former crack user, faced up to 25 years in prison after he was convicted of illegal gun possession and two related firearm offenses. But thanks to his father’s intervention, he did not suffer any criminal punishment at all.

The president, who had repeatedly promised to refrain from intervening in his son’s case, said he changed his mind because he concluded that the prosecution was politically motivated. That claim was puzzling because the prosecutor who pursued the gun charges, Special Counsel David Weiss, had been appointed by Biden’s own attorney general. But Biden described the charges as highly unusual. “Without aggravating factors like use in a crime, multiple purchases, or buying a weapon as a straw purchaser, people are almost never brought to trial on felony charges” in cases like this, he said. “It is clear that Hunter was treated differently.”

Ledvina agrees that Hunter Biden “was treated differently,” but not in the sense that the president meant. “People are tried and imprisoned on these charges all the time, even absent other charges or a [criminal] background,” he writes from the federal prison in Memphis. “Where is my pardon?”

Ledvina’s complaint illustrates the wildly uneven impact of an arbitrary, constitutionally dubious gun law that is widely flouted and haphazardly enforced. Under 18 USC 922(g)(3), “an unlawful user” of “any controlled substance” who receives or possesses a firearm is committing a felony punishable by up to 15 years in prison. That ban, which Congress originally approved as part of the Gun Control Act of 1968, applies to all illegal drug users, including cannabis consumers who live in states that have legalized marijuana. Under Section 922(g)(3), it does not matter whether someone handles guns while intoxicated or otherwise poses a danger to public safety. To convict someone of this felony, it is enough to show that he uses drugs and possesses firearms, whether or not he ever mixes those two things.

A conviction for illegal gun possession also results in the permanent loss of Second Amendment rights under another provision of the same law, which bans gun possession by anyone convicted of a crime punishable by more than a year of incarceration. And people who falsely deny drug use when they fill out the form that must be completed to buy a gun from a federally licensed dealer, as both Ledvina and Hunter Biden did, can be charged with two additional felonies. 

A law that Joe Biden signed in 2022 created yet another potential charge for people who do what his son did. All told, the maximum possible sentences add up to nearly half a century behind bars under current law. Biden seems to think drug users who buy guns are committing a serious crime that merits a stiff prison sentence—except when his son does it.

Although people who commit that crime theoretically could go to prison for the rest of their lives, they rarely face all the possible charges, sentences typically are much shorter than the statutory maximums, and the vast majority of potential defendants are never prosecuted at all. Survey data suggest that something like 20 million American drug users (mostly cannabis consumers) own guns. Yet federal prosecutors filed charges under Section 922(g)(3) just 120 times a year, on average, from FY 2008 through FY 2017. So you have to be extremely unlucky to find yourself in that situation, which arises only when both your drug use and your gun ownership come to the government’s attention.

Ledvina and Hunter Biden were both unlucky in that way. But while Biden had the good fortune to have a father in the White House, Ledvina had no such advantage, which explains why he is serving a four-year prison sentence for a crime that violated no one’s rights.

That penalty is not only unjust; it is arguably unconstitutional. Prior to his conviction, Ledvina unsuccessfully argued that Section 922(g)(3) is unconstitutionally vague and inconsistent with the Second Amendment both on its face and as applied to him. He is now pursuing an appeal that reiterates those claims. Hunter Biden tried similar Second Amendment arguments before his trial, although his father’s favoritism obviated the need for an appeal.

Ledvina’s prospects in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit, which includes Iowa, are uncertain. But several federal courts in other circuits have rejected Section 922(g)(3) prosecutions of marijuana users on Second Amendment grounds. Applying the constitutional test that the Supreme Court established in the 2022 case New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, they concluded that prosecuting those cannabis consumers for gun possession was not “consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

Ledvina’s fate hinges on whether he can persuade the 8th Circuit to embrace the logic of those decisions. The court declined to do so in April 2024, when it rejected a facial challenge to Section 922(g)(3). But in February 2025, the 8th Circuit held in United States v. Cooper that specific prosecutions under that law can violate the Second Amendment, so there may be hope for Ledvina. Either way, the Supreme Court ultimately will have to decide whether categorically banning firearm possession by drug users, which is analogous to decreeing that anyone who drinks alcohol may not own guns, can be reconciled with the constitutional right to keep and bear arms.

‘Incredibly Stupid’

Hunter Biden established one element of his guilt under Section 922(g)(3) by publicly discussing his crack addiction, which he detailed in his 2021 memoir Beautiful Things. The other element was provided by Hallie Biden, the widow of Hunter’s brother Beau. After Hunter bought a revolver from a Wilmington, Delaware, gun shop in October 2018, Hallie, who had started dating Hunter in 2016, became concerned that he might harm himself. Her “incredibly stupid” solution, as Hunter’s lawyer described it during his trial, was to remove the gun from his pickup truck and toss it into a trash bin behind a grocery store.

When Hallie came back to recover the weapon, it was gone. She reported that fact to the grocery store, which is how the gun came to the attention of the Delaware State Police, the FBI, and federal prosecutors. “I told [her] that [she] needed to call the police and file a report that the gun had been lost,” Biden said in a recent interview with the online news organization Channel 5.

Under a June 2023 deal that also would have resolved tax charges against Biden, Weiss agreed to refrain from prosecuting him for illegal gun possession if he successfully completed a pretrial diversion program. But that deal fell apart the following month under scrutiny by U.S. District Judge Maryellen Noreika, who viewed some of its provisions as legally problematic.

Although Noreika told the government and Biden’s lawyers to try again, subsequent negotiations failed to produce a new agreement. Prosecutors “blew it up on purpose at the behest of the right wing,” Biden claimed in the Channel 5 interview. Then Weiss obtained an indictment that added two new charges, both based on the form Biden filled out when he bought the revolver.

Among other things, that form asked whether Biden was “an unlawful user of, or addicted to, marijuana or any depressant, stimulant, narcotic drug, or any other controlled substance.” He checked “no,” thereby violating 18 USC 922(a)(6), which makes it a felony to provide false information in connection with a gun purchase. The same checkmark also violated 18 USC 924(a)(1)(A), which makes it a felony to provide a false statement “with respect to” information that gun dealers are required to record. Although the Justice Department concedes “there is considerable overlap in the conduct covered” by those two provisions, that did not stop Weiss from pursuing both charges.

Prior to Biden’s trial, his lawyers asked Noreika to dismiss the gun charges as inconsistent with the Second Amendment. “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,” they wrote, “but that statute’s status-based prohibition on gun ownership recently was struck down as unconstitutional under the Second Amendment.” They were referring to an August 2023 decision in which the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit overturned a marijuana user’s conviction for illegal gun possession.

That case began with an April 2022 traffic stop in Hancock County, Mississippi. After Patrick Darnell Daniels Jr. was pulled over for driving without a license plate, police found a pistol, a rifle, and the remains of a few joints in his car. He was convicted of violating Section 922(g)(3) and sentenced to nearly four years in prison. That prosecution, the 5th Circuit ruled in United States v. Daniels, failed the Bruen test. “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,” it said. “Nor do more generalized traditions of disarming dangerous persons support this restriction on nonviolent drug users.”

Despite that seemingly relevant ruling by one of the country’s most conservative appeals courts, Noreika rejected Biden’s argument that Section 922(g)(3) is unconstitutional on its face. She noted that Daniels was limited to the specific facts of that case and that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit had recently rejected a facial challenge to the law. As the 8th Circuit saw it in United States v. Veasley, the ban on gun possession by drug users was analogous to legal restrictions on “the mentally ill” during the 18th and 19th centuries. Although Noreika favored that take on the law, she said Biden, once convicted, could still argue that Section 922(g)(3) was unconstitutional as applied to him.

Biden’s conviction seemed like a foregone conclusion. During a five-month sojourn in Los Angeles beginning in the spring of 2018, Biden recalls in his memoir, he was “up twenty-four hours a day, smoking [crack] every fifteen minutes, seven days a week.” That fall, he writes, “I came back east” after “my most recent relapse in California, with the hope of getting clean through a new therapy and reconciling with Hallie.” But he adds that “neither happened.” He tried ketamine therapy in Massachusetts, but it was “disastrous,” and he “backslid.” He would “stay clean for a week, break away from the center to meet a connection I found in Rhode Island, smoke up, then return.”

During Biden’s 2024 trial at the federal courthouse in Wilmington, his lawyers nevertheless argued that he was not a drug user or addict when he bought the revolver on October 12, 2018, or during the 11 days he possessed it. Biden, who told Channel 5 he bought the gun “on a whim,” never loaded it, and kept it in a lockbox, said he “checked that box” denying that he was an illegal drug user or addict because he viewed it as “a state-of-mind question” asking whether he was “right now addicted,” which was not how he viewed himself at that moment.   

According to the prosecution, such quibbling was beside the point. Under federal regulations, the Justice Department notes, a buyer violates Section 922(g)(3) if he has used an illegal drug “recently enough to indicate that the individual is actively engaged in such conduct.” Federal courts have said “a temporal nexus is required between the drug use and the firearm possession,” it says. “Courts now examine the ‘pattern and recency’ of the defendant’s drug use in determining if there is a temporal nexus between the possession of the firearm and drug use.” But they “do not require contemporaneous use.”

The jurors evidently took the same view. Unimpressed by Biden’s parsing of exactly when he was using crack, they convicted him on all charges in June 2024.

Biden v. Biden

Biden was lucky he had bought a gun in 2018, four years before his father signed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which increased the maximum penalty for illegal gun possession from 10 years to 15 years. That law also created a new charge, likewise punishable by up to 15 years in prison, that could be deployed against defendants like Biden: “trafficking in firearms,” which Congress counterintuitively defined broadly enough to cover drug users who obtain guns. If those changes had been enacted prior to Biden’s gun purchase, he could have faced a maximum sentence of 45 years rather than 25. In the Channel 5 interview, Biden praised his father for his role in enacting “the first gun legislation…in a generation,” apparently oblivious to its implications for firearm cases like his.

During the period when Biden was trying to resolve his gun case without going to jail, his father’s administration was stubbornly defending the ban he violated against challenges by cannabis consumers. In one case after another, the government’s lawyers argued that marijuana users have no Second Amendment rights, either because they are not part of “the people” whose right to arms is constitutionally pr

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