Gun control organizations, including Everytown for Gun Safety, Giffords, and Brady are all studiously avoiding comment after their champion Joe Biden delivered a sweeping pardon to Hunter Biden late Sunday, wiping away his convictions for lying about his drug abuse on a background check form and possessing a firearm as an unlawful user of drugs.
To be fair, those same outfits weren't exactly loquacious at the time of Biden's conviction either. In fact, just hours after a jury delivered its verdict back in June, his dad Joe addressed Everytown activists, and neither Biden nor any Everytown official could bring themselves to mention the felony convictions.
Instead, speaking as someone who has had two children die prematurely, he spent much of his remarks reflecting on personal loss and saying that he empathized with those in the audience who have lost loved ones to gun violence.
“Never give up on hope,” the president told the audience.
While Biden did not reference his son’s conviction on stage Tuesday afternoon, it was sure to be at the top of his mind. Biden is known to be passionately defensive of his family and sensitive to outside criticism of his son’s troubled history.
The president rearranged his schedule to leave directly from the gun-safety event for Wilmington, where his son remains after the jury there convicted him. The White House cancelled a previously scheduled press briefing that was to take place Tuesday afternoon.
When Biden did release a statement about Hunter's conviction, of course, he pledged to "accept the outcome" and "respect the judicial process"... a promise that lasted less than six months before he abruptly reversed course and issued a blanket pardon covering any crimes committed by his son over the past decade.
Just as Hunter Biden's conviction was met with deafening silence by the gun control lobby, news of the president's pardoning of his son has failed to draw any response at all from the likes of Everytown. Though many (okay, some) Democrats and liberal groups have expressed disappointment or disgust (sincere or not) over Biden's pardon, the anti-gunners have instead focused on drumming up donations and encouraging anti-gun activists to stay the course once Donald Trump is sworn in for his second term.
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Gun violence will not stop, so neither can we. As soon as Trump takes office, we’ve got to be ready to defend our gun safety laws and push back on extremists who want to force more guns into our communities.
— Everytown (@Everytown) December 2, 2024
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It was just a few weeks ago that Everytown and other anti-gun orgs were pretending they didn't have a problem with gun owners or with gun ownership, but now that the election is over they can take off their masks and once again proclaim their opposition to any exercise of our Second Amendment rights.
Denouncing their "gunsense" champion, on the other hand, is apparently still a bridge too far for the prohibitionists. Despite the damage that Biden has done to their cause by giving his son a pass on federal gun laws, virtually every major gun control group has remained silent on the biggest news story of the day. It's also worth pointing out there's been no word of any resignations from the activists working for the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, even though Biden's pardon flies in the face of their demands to fully enforce all of the federal gun laws currently in place.
The cowardly lack of response from the likes of Everytown and their cohorts in the gun prohibition movement is telling. Though Biden's pardon flies in the face of everything that gun control activists hold dear, they'd rather compromise their principles than criticize one of their own. Blasting Joe Biden for pardoning his son should have been a no-brainer for the gun control lobby, but they've shown that it's not just Biden who has a glaring double standard when it comes to violating federal gun laws. The anti-gun groups aren't just willing to give Hunter a pass. They're willing to turn a blind eye to the most egregious abuses of power... so long as it's a Democrat who's doing the abuse.
