Hunter Biden’s fate could be decided at an appellate court not far from his family’s home state of Delaware. That brings into focus the possibility — rich in irony — that one of the signal products of the Supreme Court’s rightward shift, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen, could shield the son of one of its most vociferous opponents, the president.

The nation, then, could be treated to the spectacle of Hunter Biden’s lawyers mounting a constitutional challenge on the basis of a Supreme Court decision the president — their client’s father — maintains “contradicts both common sense and the Constitution, and should deeply trouble us all.”

The most imminent peril to Mr. Biden fils comes from the United States attorney at Delaware, David Weiss. He has been investigating the first son regarding possible tax crimes and over whether Hunter lied about his drug use so he could buy a gun. 

That latter possible offense is where Mr. Biden fils’s fate could owe its freedom to, of all people, Justice Clarence Thomas, the man who once accused the president — then a senator — of leading a “high-tech lynching” during his notorious confirmation hearings. Mr. Biden was then the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Justice Thomas called Mr. Biden’s questions during the hearings “beanballs.” 

Hunter Biden’s attorneys are likely following closely the fate of Bryan David Range, who a quarter of a century ago pleaded guilty to making a false statement to obtain food stamps assistance. Although that crime was a misdemeanor, it carried a prison sentence that triggered a ban on owning a gun. At the time, Mr. Range worked as a lawn mower and had three children. 

Mt. Range served no jail time, and since that offense his criminal record amounts to a few parking violations and one fishing offense, for a suspended license. His efforts to buy a firearm have been frustrated, though. As his attorneys explain, his case turns on what limits “the Second Amendment puts on the ability of governments to limit access to firearms because of a citizen’s non-violent misdemeanor.”

Mr. Range argues that in blocking him from gaining access to a firearm, the government overstepped that ability. He lost at the district court, and then before a panel of three riders of the United State Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, which cited “a longstanding tradition of disarming citizens who are not law-abiding.”

In February, the full host of the Third Circuit heard the latest iteration of Mr. Range’s appeal. They did so, though, in a landscape that had undergone a jurisprudential earthquake after the handing down of Bruen. That ruling from 2022, a 6-to-3 decision written by Justice Thomas, ordained that restrictions on the ability to purchase guns must be “consistent with this nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

That new standard could be a boon to Mr. Range and Mr. Biden fils both. The New York Times reports that if Hunter Biden is charged with lying about his drug use in violation of the law, lawyers will challenge whether that law can survive in a post-Bruen world. 

In his memoir, “Beautiful Things,” Mr. Biden fils allows that he was “smoking crack every 15 minutes” at the time of the gun purchase. He answered “no” on the form in question when asked if he used drugs. Now, Mr. Weiss will have to decide whether that act of omission is worthy of prosecution.  

One district court judge, Carlton Reeves, has vented about Bruen, writing that his fellow jurists are “not experts in what white, wealthy, and male property owners thought about firearms regulation in 1791. Yet we are now expected to play historian in the name of constitutional adjudication.”