Hunter Biden says it’s inconceivable for anyone to be charged with gun crimes for his kind of behavior.

Tell that to David Jon Ray, an Illinois businessman who failed to pay taxes over three years and, when authorities moved to investigate him, admitted he was a habitual cocaine user with a penchant for guns.

He earned a 37-month federal prison sentence for those offenses.

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Mr. Biden, who also faces a battery of tax and gun possession charges, goes on trial in a federal court in Delaware on Monday for the gun charges.

The president’s son is accused of possessing a revolver while a user of unlawful drugs and of lying about his drug habit while going through the federal firearms purchase background check.

He argues he is being singled out for prosecution because of his famous father.

Yet a Washington Times review of federal gun prosecutions has found many cases of prosecution, conviction and incarceration for those kinds of charges.

Nicole Blakely, an Arkansas woman who tried to help her boyfriend escape conviction on gun charges by claiming at trial she owned a handgun and all the marijuana found in their home, was ultimately convicted and served a year of home confinement.

Federal prosecutors in Vermont this year charged a man as a drug user in possession of a shotgun after local police found him asleep in a vehicle with cocaine and a short-barreled shotgun.

In Iowa, Tyshawn Bush was a passenger during a vehicle stop where police found a shotgun he had bought. Police determined he was a marijuana user at the time he bought the weapon, and prosecutors won a conviction for lying on the background check form. He was sentenced to four years in prison.

Mr. Ray lied on three years of tax returns, bilking the government out of $1.2 million in taxes owed. When agents moved to search his Illinois home in 2012, they found 110 grams of cocaine and nearly 100 firearms.

The fact patterns are different, but the core facts of each case are the same as Mr. Biden’s: A drug user had a firearm.

Feeding the beast

Mr. Biden faces three charges: making a false statement in the purchase of a firearm, making a false statement related to information required to be kept by a licensed gun dealer and possession of a firearm by an unlawful drug user.

He has provided most of the evidence being used against him.

His 2021 memoir, “Beautiful Things,” explored the depths of his drug struggles. He gave dates and details, including repeated mentions of his quest for crack around the time he showed up at a Delaware firearms dealer in 2018 to buy a Colt Cobra revolver.

“All my energy revolved around smoking drugs and making arrangements to buy drugs — feeding the beast,” he wrote.

Mr. Biden’s laptop, which he abandoned at a computer store, and his iCloud account, which federal investigators obtained through a warrant, filled in other details. In one text message dated the day after he bought the revolver, he talked about waiting for his “dealer named Mookie.” The next day, Mr. Biden said he had been “smoking crack on 4th street and Rodney.”

He had the gun for less than two weeks. Hallie Biden, the widow of his brother who became his paramour, plucked the gun from his car and dumped it into the garbage at Janssen’s Market in Delaware. She said she thought he was a danger, and she worried children might have found the gun, which she said he left unlocked in his truck.

Given his own words, Mr. Biden’s attorneys have done little to contest the evidence. Instead, they asked the judge in his case to dismiss the felony gun charges by arguing that Mr. Biden faced vindictive prosecution.

They pointed to government statistics that showed just 1.8% of gun crime prosecutions from 2008 to 2017 were for unlawful drug users in possession of a firearm. Given the more than 132,000 prosecutions, that works out to more than 2,000 cases.

Mr. Biden’s attorneys said there are fewer than 1,000 investigations per year into lying about drug use on a firearms purchase background check form or being involved in transporting a weapon illegally.

The judge rejected Mr. Biden’s motion to dismiss the charges.

Warren Eller, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, said Mr. Biden’s case is rare — but then again, so is Mr. Biden’s set of circumstances.

For much of his life, he operated in his father’s updraft, securing business deals, a cushy job with the Navy Reserve and lenient treatment upon his discharge from the service after failing a drug test. Now, the tailwind has become a headwind, Mr. Eller said, as the president’s tough talk on guns is trained on his son.

“Fortunately or unfortunately, I think the reason Hunter is in the position he’s in is his father’s president of the United States, and he’s a public figure, and that’s largely because of who his father is,” Mr. Eller said. “The difference is Hunter’s been on the front page and Hunter’s father’s been on the front page talking about the need to strengthen and enforce gun laws.”

In an op-ed in USA Today last year after the indictment was handed up, Hunter Biden said he felt persecuted.

“My struggles and my mistakes have been fodder for a vile and sustained disinformation campaign against him, and an all-out annihilation of my reputation through high-pitched but fruitless congressional investigations and, more recently, criminal charges for possessing an unloaded gun for 11 days five years ago — charges that appear to be the first-ever of their kind brought in the history of Delaware,” he said.

He suggested that the “weaponization of my addiction” would prevent others from getting sober.

Probation

Mr. Biden is being prosecuted under a section of the law that makes it illegal for a drug user to purchase or possess a firearm. He is charged with possession of the weapon and with lying on the background check when he denied being a user of unlawful drugs.

The same section of the law also bars convicted felons, most illegal immigrants, dishonorably discharged veterans, fugitives, those with mental illness and several other categories from obtaining a gun.

Prosecutions of felons are the most common charge under the law, with 79% of prohibited person prosecutions in 2021, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission.

Drug use was a distant second at 5.3%. That works out to about 440 drug users who were sentenced for possession of a firearm in 2021.

Illegal immigrants and temporary visa holders were third at 2.9% of cases completed.

In 2020, 332,200 people attempted and were denied purchase because they were prohibited, and 28,683 of them — some 8.6% — were because of drug use or addiction.

Mr. Eller said many of those cases constitute crimes but hardly any are prosecuted.

“We’ve got a system that’s meant to keep people who shouldn’t have guns from having guns, and not a single person is going in to buy a gun who doesn’t know the answers to those questions before they go in,” Mr. Eller said. “Unfortunately, the one thing this should demonstrate to us is how little time we spend on prevention in looking for people who test the system, who fail the system and are never followed up on.”

Many of those prosecuted for being illegal drug users with guns have had other legal entanglements.

Paul Lachapelle Jr. faced several misdemeanor charges over the years before police in Springfield, Vermont, encountered him after a homeowner reported she had seen a man with a holstered handgun on her door camera.

By the time police arrived, Lachapelle had tossed the gun into the grass. Authorities retrieved it, persuaded Lachapelle to admit it was his, and then looked at his police record and figured out he was also a regular drug user.

He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to time served — about eight months.

Other cases The Times found involved a drunken man at a bar who seemed to be threatening other patrons with his gun; a woman whom cops pulled over for driving a stolen vehicle and found her with drugs and a gun; a woman who helped arrange an armed robbery of the gun store where she worked; a man who shot his brother-in-law after a fight over whether they were sober enough to drive; and numerous cases of people who were found with stolen firearms or guns with obliterated serial numbers.

Lawyers told The Times that the gun charge is the easiest to make stick because all it requires is proving possession of the weapon and some element of drug use. The result is an easy felony conviction. Other circumstances, such as threatening behavior, can be used to argue for longer sentences.

Mr. Biden faces a maximum of 25 years in prison, but Mr. Eller said that’s unthinkable and probation is a more likely outcome if he is convicted.

“I would be really surprised if he got jail time for it,” Mr. Eller said.