President Joe Biden has pardoned his son of all federal crimes, including his gun infractions.

On Sunday, Hunter Biden had his convictions undone. Despite repeatedly saying he would not intervene to help his son, President Biden issued a sweeping pardon that covers the last ten years and even potential crimes Hunter has not been indicted over. That applies to his three convictions on federal gun crimes, which Biden argued were unfair.

“Today, I signed a pardon for my son Hunter,” President Biden wrote. “From the day I took office, I said I would not interfere with the Justice Department’s decision-making, and I kept my word even as I have watched my son being selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted. 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 solely for how they filled out a gun form.”

The pardon marks the end of the younger Biden’s fight against gun charges and shortcircuits the potential Second Amendment showdown Hunter’s lawyers had promised. President Biden’s comments undermining the seriousness of his son breaking federal restrictions on drug users owning guns could also bolster ongoing and future challenges to those prohibitions.

Biden argued the sweeping pardon was necessary because Hunter had been targetted by his political opponents and would likely be again.

“No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son – and that is wrong,” he said. “There has been an effort to break Hunter – who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution. In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me – and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough.”

President-elect Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened Hunter Biden over the years, including promising to appoint a special prosecutor to pursue an investigation into him and reposting an image with Hunter and other prominent Democrats in prison jumpsuits. His current picks to head the Department of Justice, Pam Bondi, and Federal Bureau of Investigation, Kash Patel, have both claimed Hunter committed crimes beyond those he has been convicted of already.

“Hunter Biden was shown to have been in bed with criminals from the Ukraine and China to lobby the US government through the laundering of money that Hunter Biden and Devon Archer received and leveraging his relationship with his dad, Vice President Joe Biden,” Patel told Real America News in 2023. “That is the definition of violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act. He didn’t register. This DOJ should, of course, charge him. They won’t because they’ll give him a pass and bury it with the Trump indictment. So, I think that is where we need to focus.”

However, the gun charges Hunter was convicted of are not as rare as President Biden made them out to be.

While drug-user-in-possession charges are far from the most frequent federal gun charges, it is used fairly often. Though felon-in-possession gun charges made up the vast majority of federal prosecutions–with tens of thousands of cases per year–federal authorities brought drug user infractions as a lead charge in over 100 gun cases a year between 2008 and 2017, according to data collected by Syracuse University.

South Texas College of Law Professor Dru Stevenson has noted the possession charge Hunter was convicted of is not typically what spurs a prosecution.

“As a general matter, it is extraordinarily rare to see cases where 922(g)3 is brought as a standalone charge – the circumstances of the arrest that led to the charge typically involve a drug bust or drug-related violence, so it is one of several charges in the case,” Stevenson, who has studied the practical application of the charge, told The Reload when Hunter was first charged.

But the Syracuse data shows Hunter’s case is far from the only time the charge has been used on its own. Some other recent examples have also garnered national attention. Jared Michael Harrison was prosecuted after police found a gun and marijuana in his car during a traffic stop in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma back in May 2022. In fact, US District Judge Patrick Wyrick found the federal prohibition violated Harrison’s Second Amendment in a February 2023 ruling. US District Judge Kathleen Cardone threw out a similar case against an El Paso, Texas, woman a month later.

Additionally, Hunter’s public actions brought more attention to his gun purchase than there might otherwise have been.

Hunter Biden’s convictions stem from his October 2018 purchase of a Colt Cobra revolver. That happened during his then-ongoing battle with substance abuse. In his 2018 memoir “Beautiful Things,” he said he was “smoking crack every 15 minutes” around the time he bought his gun. Anyone who “is an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance” is barred by federal law from purchasing or possessing a firearm. Additionally, the federal background check form 4473 specifically requires buyers to attest they aren’t addicted to drugs when buying a gun and it is a separate crime to lie on that form.

The publicity tour for Hunter Biden’s book, where he often described his drug use, drew heightened scrutiny from federal prosecutors last year. Special Counsel David Weiss was appointed to investigate Hunter’s gun purchase and alleged tax evasion as a result. Hunter nearly secured a diversion agreement that would have allowed him to plead guilty to separate misdemeanor tax offenses and avoid prosecution in the gun case provided he agree not to own firearms in the future. However, scrutiny from Judge Maryellen Noreika, who questioned the unusual nature of the deal, ultimately caused the agreement to fall apart. Weiss indicted Hunter last September and a jury convicted him on all counts in June.

President Biden said he hoped Americans would agree with his decision to pardon his son.

“I believe in the justice system, but as I have wrestled with this, I also believe raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice – and once I made this decision this weekend, there was no sense in delaying it further,” he said. “I hope Americans will understand why a father and a President would come to this decision.”