Hunter Biden is now facing federal gun charges for lying on a Form 4473. There are mixed feelings about this across the board.

Some believe this will allow President Joe Biden to get away with his alleged crimes–it shouldn’t, but I can’t rule it out–and others take issue with them for other reasons.

Regardless, there are now charges.

Unsurprisingly, though, a lot of people who support gun control are trying to make it look like it’s hypocritical that gun rights supporters are celebrating those charges.

Congressman James Comer, the Republican chair of the House oversight committee who has focused his investigative work on the president’s son and his business dealings, described the three-felony gun charges filed against Hunter Biden as “a very small start”. In a post shared to his social media platform Truth Social, Donald Trump lamented that the gun charges were “the only crime that Hunter Biden committed that does not implicate Crooked Joe Biden”.

Despite Republicans’ gripes, a number of legal experts have framed Hunter Biden’s indictment as unusually harsh, given that prosecutors rarely bring such gun charges. The law underlying one of the three criminal counts is also now facing legal challenges after the supreme court’s recent expansion of second amendment rights.

Meanwhile, the legal morass has put conservatives in an awkward position, as they simultaneously pillory Hunter Biden and champion the loosening of firearm regulations that could get his charges thrown out.

…

Charges over lying on forms necessary to purchase firearms are similarly rare, with fewer than 300 cases being brought in the year that Hunter Biden bought his gun, according to data compiled by the Washington Post.

So the basic argument is that we’re hypocrites because we’re glad to see this.

Except, that’s not really the case. Most gun rights supporters who have commented on this take the position that the law may be wrong, but Hunter Biden shouldn’t get a pass as others are prosecuted.

Journalists have jumped on the “the charges are rare” thing as we can see above, yet they don’t bother to ask why there were less than 300 cases brought that year.

The answers matter. After all, if the issue is that those are just the cases they found out about? Is it that these were the only ones they had enough evidence to bother prosecuting? Or is it that they normally just let this slide? Could there just be less than 300 people violating that particular law in total?

It seems kind of stupid to decide not to enforce a law just because it’s rarely broken.

Regardless of why, however, Hunter Biden was known to have broken this particular law, a law his own father championed while also pushing for more gun control regulations. He wasn’t looking at charges for breaking that law as part of a deal that also gave him a pass for tax evasion.

While I oppose the law, it’s still on the books. People are prosecuted for breaking that law. It doesn’t take much to find cases of people being prosecuted for breaking that law. So why does Hunter get a pass when none of these other people got one?

That’s our point. That’s been our point.

I sincerely hope the courts throw out this law. For me, it’s not important that Hunter goes to prison. It’s important that the rules which apply to me also apply to him. If I face prison time for violating a law I disagree with, no one should get to skate on the exact same charges because their daddy is important.

How is this so hard for some people to understand? Equal protection before the law is a thing, and since several hundred were prosecuted for the same violation in just the year Hunter bought his gun, you can’t pretend no one is ever prosecuted for this.

The thing is, so many of the people upset by these charges are anti-gunners themselves. They want gun control. They’re constantly pushing for gun control after every high-profile shooting, often before we even know exactly what happened.

If there’s hypocrisy in this, it’s that these people want rules to apply to you, then think Hunter should get a pass.