Bryan Miller of CeasefireNJ:
“I don’t think this will have any effect on New Jersey’s laws,” he said. “The court clearly said that state and local authorities have the ability to regulate guns, which is what we do here.”
Scott Bach of ANJRPC:
“The Garden State’s notoriously bad gun laws — which turn honest citizens into criminals yet fail to punish violent criminal behaviors — are certain to be tested,” said Scott Bach, the group’s president.
Jersey City’s Mayor Jerry Healy:
“The laws that were in place in Chicago and Oak Park, Ill., were struck down because they were an outright ban on anyone having a handgun, even in their own home,” he said in an e-mail. “Our laws do not prohibit a person from having a handgun.”
Regarding NJ’s One Gun a Month Law Post McDonald:
“(The law) doesn’t take away your right to bear arms, so in that sense, it may be upheld,” said Alan Tarr, director of the Center for State Constitutional Studies at Rutgers-Camden. “But on the other hand, if you had a law that said you could only write one editorial a month, you’d run into trouble.”
We’ll see what happens here in the Garden State. But to be honest, I don’t think much will change. And with Paula Dow as the State AG, oh boy, do we still have an uphill battle.
This is where the budget crisis may help – the AG may not get the budget necessary to defend some of these cases.
(Some of the IL towns folded rather than fight what eventually became McDonald vs Chicago)
I was thinking the same thing……
In fact, I would like to see someone propose going to straight-up NICS for purchase as a budgetary measure (rather than additionally tying it shall-issue carry permits as has been done historically). NJ’s limitations on purchase mirror the federal ones; why not just cut out the middleman?
There’s a bill in Trenton that’s supposed to just that. I wonder if it will get any traction.
Last I saw anything like it, the bill *also* made the carry permit shall-issue; and was therefore DOA.
Pingback: New Jersey Reactions to McDonald | Snowflakes in Hell
Pingback: SayUncle » A river in Egypt
The quoted anti-gunners are either being wildly disingenuous or incredibly ignorant. What Alan Gura did in Heller and in McDonald was take steps one and two of a long march to reinvigorate the US Constitution’s individual liberty guarantees.
Yes, Heller in dicta points out that Heller does not invalidate any other regulation of firearms than the District’s total ban on registering new handguns. That is because the ONLY question before the US Supreme Court in Heller was whether or not a total handgun ban is constitutional. Other regulations were not before the court for consideration of any kind. Similarly, McDonald only asked the court to rule on the constitutionality of a handgun ban by a state or local government, that is, to incorporate the 2nd Amendment against state infringement.
To say that NJ laws on guns are constitutional on the basis of Heller and McDonald is similar to saying Al Sharpton is not a racist hustler because Obama was elected president. The existence of one has zero bearing on the other.
Well I know there was a very good chance that at least one of the two anti gunners was very buzzed, if not outright drunk when making their statements.
