The Third Circuit’s decision striking down New Jersey’s assault weapon ban was just the latest blow to the Garden State’s gun control scheme. While there are still plenty of gun control laws on the books there, the reality is that the judicial landscape isn’t supportive of the idea that they’re constitutional, even a little bit.
After all, it was a Biden-appointed judge who wrote the majority’s decision in that most recent case. Even the liberal judges are starting to recognize that the time for gun control is well in the past.
But New Jersey isn’t going to be satisfied with that. It wants to keep pushing, apparently.
On May 30, 1990, New Jersey Gov. Jim Florio signed a ban on assault weapons into law, making good on one of his campaign promises and giving New Jersey some of the strictest gun regulations in the country.
Thirty-six years later, that law has been left in tatters by the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled last week that the Second Amendment disallows the state’s prohibitions on semi-automatic rifles and magazines with over 10 rounds of ammunition.
It was the latest in a long line of judicial decisions that have poked holes in New Jersey’s expansive gun laws, which had been held up by Democrats as evidence that stricter regulations lead to lower rates of gun violence. Now, facing a federal judiciary that’s likely to scrutinize everything they do, the state’s Democratic leaders are confronted with a difficult choice on how to proceed.
Gov. Mikie Sherrill, who won the governor’s office last November with a campaign promise to protect and expand the state’s firearm restrictions, said on Monday that she thinks New Jersey should continue putting forward new laws even at the risk of getting slapped down by the courts yet again.
“When it comes to protecting our kids, yeah, I’m going to keep testing the courts, because this is wrong,” Sherrill said. “We should be held up as a model, not attacked by the federal government and Trump’s handpicked court.”
What that might look like, though, is less clear. Spokespeople for legislative leaders in the state Assembly and Senate both said that Democrats are considering paths forward without offering any specifics: “The Senate is reviewing the court’s decision and evaluating all available legislative and legal options to preserve effective, commonsense gun safety measures,” a Senate Democratic spokesperson said.
Sherrill wants to “test” the courts, and thinks New Jersey should be the shining beacon on the hill, rather than blasted for their ridiculous history of infringing on a constitutionally protected right that literally ends with the phrase “shall not be infringed.”
But yeah, this is all Trump’s fault.
Meanwhile, Democrats in the state are already looking at how they can test the Court. And one example kind of proves just how idiotic this push is likely to be.
Assembly Majority Leader Lou Greenwald has a more concrete proposal: his long-languishing bill to mandate gun owners store their firearms unloaded and locked inside their homes – or face stiff penalties. That bill, A3560, has been floating around the statehouse since 2021 but has never reached a full floor vote.
Greenwald told POLITICO the bill was “the next thing I’m looking to do” on gun safety.
“The major cause of injury in someone’s home is through a gun that is stored improperly,” he said.
Never mind the similarities between this and the law challenged in Heller, mind you. Oh no, that doesn’t matter, because self-defense is only acknowledged when they try to keep AR-15s off the market. Here, Greenwald is actively pushing a bill that will make it even more difficult to have a gun for self-defense.
A3560 not only requires that a firearm be locked up and unloaded, but that ammunition be stored separately from the gun. In other words, you can’t keep the magazine next to it to ease loading when someone breaks into your house in the middle of the night. So, while you’re fumbling with the combination or biometrics, you still have to also grab the ammo and put it in the gun.
It’s not that different than the DC measure that prompted Heller in the first place.
Plus, contrary to what Greenwald might want you to think, accidental shootings aren’t nearly as common as self-defense shootings, which means that if there is a bias to be had, it should be toward protecting people’s ability to protect themselves.
And as bad as this one is, it’s unlikely to be the last.
“We’re constantly wasting time, energy, money focused on things that are settled business,” Republican Assemblymember Brian Bergen told Politico. “The ruling happened, it’s the ruling. They can challenge it. But what I don’t want to see them do is throw all kinds of bills against the wall to see what sticks.”
Yet that’s what they’re likely to do. It’s pretty much what New York did following Bruen. They created as many barriers as they could think of to lawful carry, all in an effort to see what would survive challenge and what wouldn’t. Sherrill and her bunch will do the same thing again.
But they shouldn’t.
As I already noted, the judicial landscape doesn’t work in their favor. While Sherrill can scream “TRUMP!” as much as she wants, it doesn’t change the fact that the Supreme Court was chosen in full compliance with the laws of the United States of America and the Constitution. If she doesn’t like the outcome, then tough. Welcome to what used to be our world.
We’ll only point and laugh at your discomfort for a little while.
Probably.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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