I don't like it when the connected get special treatment before the law. There's a reason I was so infuriated when Hunter Biden got a pardon. No, what he did in buying that gun shouldn't be illegal, but others are rotting in prison for the exact same offense.
I also get infuriated when the brother of a somewhat well-known actress gets prison time for something that shouldn't be illegal.
The difference is that this time, it's the law that's the problem, not the penalty or lack thereof.
You see, actress Julia Fox is probably best known for her role as Adam Sandler's mistress in the critically acclaimed film Uncut Gems. Her brother, on the other hand, is best known for his appearance in a New York courtroom over charges that he was producing firearms, known to the media as "ghost guns."
Julia Fox’s brother was sentenced to more than a year behind bars on gun possession charges Wednesday — as their dad implored the court not to “waste taxpayer dollars” locking up his “harmless” son.
Christopher Fox, 31, was sentenced to 1 1/3 to four years in prison after he pleaded guilty to criminal possession of a weapon in the third degree last December for making ghost guns with his 3D printer inside his parent’s Upper East Side apartment.
His father, Thomas, left the Manhattan Supreme Court courtroom questioning whether it made sense to burn taxpayer dollars to lock up his son — who he said wouldn’t “even hurt a bug on the floor.”
“It’s kind of a waste of taxpayer money to spend on him because he’s a harmless person, no threat to society and never sold any guns or drugs,” Thomas said, following Judge Cori Weston sentencing.
Fox, the brother of the “Uncut Gems” star, was arrested in March 2023 after authorities found numerous 3D printed parts for guns, including enough pieces to “assemble an assault weapon-style rifle,” prosecutors said at the time.
So he's guilty. He's looking at a minimum of 16 months in prison.
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But he shouldn't be.
I'm not saying they should have looked the other way, either. It's that if you look at the test laid down in the Bruen decision for whether a gun control law is constitutional or not, bans on privately made firearms simply don't meet the criteria. That decision set the requirement for there to be some kind of analog to a similar law in place around the time of the Second Amendment's ratification.
During that time and right up until recently, making your own gun was perfectly legal. You could do it without consulting anyone.
While the Rahimi decision noted the analog doesn't have to be a direct parallel, New York officials have failed to provide any analog to justify a law like this.
Now, I can't say Fox didn't get any special treatment. Dexter Taylor got 10 years over essentially the same thing, after all, though it's possible this was just a difference of scale, it's also possible that Fox's sister's position might have been of some benefit. It's also not difficult to imagine no one in the courtroom really knew who she was because I sure didn't.
What I can say definitively, though, is that neither Fox nor Taylor should be convicted felons over something that should be overturned by the courts soon enough.
