New Jersey

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Only In New Jersey

May 7, 2012 by

I don’t mean to beat up on New Jersey. Really I don’t but this is just another case of New Jersey gun laws being a trap for the unwary.

Well-known gun rights attorney Evan Nappen has a post on his website entitled, “Why is the NJ State Police Allowing Prohibited Persons to Get Guns?” The post deals with a quirk in New Jersey law which states that if you didn’t receive your firearms back after a domestic violence allegation – that is an allegation and not a conviction – you have forfeited your gun rights forever in the state of New Jersey. According to Evan, the law has been on the books since 2004 but the New Jersey State Police still haven’t updated their forms for gun purchase permits. Moreover, the penalty for purchasing or possessing a firearm in such cases is five years in prison.

Have the NJ State Police failed to fix the forms to keep folks in the dark so that they don’t fight to get their guns returned? If people knew about this law many would NOT simply agree to have their seized guns sold to a dealer, transferred to a third party, or forfeited to the State. The prosecutors and the courts would have to do lot more hearings for gun returns. (Note: prosecutors and the judges are under no legal obligation tell the unsuspecting former gun owners that their gun rights will be lost by making such a deal with the State.)

No other state has such a law. However, it is the law in NJ. I do not support this law and I believe it should be repealed. Until it is repealed, many gun owners are failing to insist upon the return of their seized guns and prohibited persons are unknowingly acquiring guns. Maybe that is the plan all along.

The very thought of losing an enumerated right over an allegation is repugnant to me. I’m in the middle of a novel based in the USSR at the time of Stalin and this reeks of that era where a mere allegation was enough to send one to the gulag.

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What The Hell Is Wrong With Judges In New Jersey?

March 25, 2011 by 7 Comments

Jeff Muller was kidnapped from his pet foods store in Newton, New Jersey last year. The five kidnappers from Missouri thought Muller was the man who had swindled one of their friends. The only problem is that they had the wrong Jeff Muller.

Photo by Lake Ozark Police Department

Fortunately, Mr. Muller was able to escape his kidnappers in Missouri when their car broke down. After his return to New Jersey,  he applied for a concealed carry permit in New Jersey as, at the time, some of the kidnappers were still at large. While approved for it by the NJ State Police, he was turned down by Judge Philip Maenza. This denial is at the heart of the Second Amendment Foundation case brought challenging NJ’s concealed carry laws.

Fast forward to today. In Morris County Superior Court, Judge David Ironson denied Mr. Muller’s appeal of his permit denial saying that “failed to provide ‘proof of justifiable need’ to carry a handgun and said he should take his case to a state appeals court.” Currently, four of the five kidnappers are in jail awaiting trial in Sussex County, NJ. However, the fifth kidnapper, Roy Slates, has served his time and is now out of prison.

As Mr. Muller said:

In an interview after the hearing, Muller said he needs to carry a handgun because “there’s the potential” of the five kidnappers’ family members “coming after me to get revenge.”

“They could send anybody out after me,” Muller said, noting that “the way we live has changed” since the ordeal. “Everything’s locked,” he said.

“I think about it every day,” Muller said. “I look at everybody who comes in my store.”

If anyone has ever met the definition of “justifiable need” for the State of New Jersey to approve a concealed carry permit it is Jeff Muller.

Judge Ironson has been on the bench since 2008. Before his being named a Superior Court judge, David Ironson was a personal injury lawyer. You would think that even a pond-scum sucking ambulance chaser might recognize that the concept of “justifiable need” applied in Jeff Muller’s case.

Independence. Integrity. Fairness. Quality Service. Those words are emblazoned under the logo of the New Jersey Court system. Judge Ironson just made a mockery of at least two of them.

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Plaintiffs File A Motion For Summary Judgment In NJ Challenge

December 22, 2010 by

Attorneys for the plaintiffs in the New Jersey case challenging the restrictiveness of the state’s concealed carry law, Muller et al v. Maenza et al, have filed a motion for summary judgment. This is the case in which both the Second Amendment Foundation and the Association of New Jersey Rifle and Pistol Clubs have banded together with a number of individual plaintiffs to challenge the constitutionality of the NJ concealed carry law.

You can read the motion here.

While I haven’t had time to read it, I thought it was important to get this information out as quickly as possible. As Sebastian has noted, this case is a facial challenge as opposed to an as applied challenge.

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SAF and NJARPC Sue New Jersey Over Handgun Permits

November 22, 2010 by 1 Comment

From the Second Amendment Foundation:

SAF SUES N.J. OFFICIALS FOR ‘DEPRIVATION
OF CIVIL RIGHTS’ ON PERMIT DENIALS

BELLEVUE, WA – The Second Amendment Foundation today filed suit in U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey against several New Jersey officials for deprivation of civil rights under color of law.

SAF is joined in the lawsuit by the Association of New Jersey Rifle & Pistol Clubs, Inc. and six private citizens whose applications for permits to carry have been denied generally on the grounds that they have not shown a “justifiable need.” One of the plaintiffs is a kidnap victim, another is a part-time sheriff’s deputy, a third carries large amounts of cash in his private business and another is a civilian employee of the FBI in New Jersey who is fearful of attack from a radical Islamic fundamentalist group. Plaintiffs are represented by attorneys David D. Jensen and Robert P. Firriolo with the firm of Duane Morris, LLP in Newark.

Named as defendants in the case are three Superior Court judges, Philip J. Maenza, Morris County; Rudolph A. Filko, Passaic County and Edward A. Jerejian of Bergen County, plus Col. Rick Fuentes, superintendent of the State Police, Hammonton Police Chief Frank Ingemi and New Jersey Attorney General Paula T. Dow.

“Law-abiding New Jersey citizens have been arbitrarily deprived of their ability to defend themselves and their families for years under the state’s horribly-crafted laws,” said SAF Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb. “The law grants uncontrolled discretion to police chiefs and other public officials to deny license applications even in cases where the applicant has shown a clear and present danger exists.

“If being a kidnap victim, or part-time law enforcement officer, or the potential target of a known radical group does not clearly demonstrate a justifiable need,” he continued, “the defendants need to explain what would. Do citizens need guns to their heads or knives to their throats before the state considers their need to be justified?

“Supreme Court rulings have made it clear that the Second Amendment prohibits states from completely banning the carrying of handguns for self-defense,” Gottlieb said. “Nor may states deny citizens the right to carry handguns in non-sensitive places or deprive them of the right to carry in an arbitrary and capricious manner. That’s what is happening today in New Jersey, and we intend to stop it.”

Sebastian at SnowFlakesInHell has more on the suit here.

A copy of the complaint may be found here.

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$500 Annual Fee for Concealed Carry?

October 3, 2010 by

NJ State Senator Jeff Van Drew (D-Cape May) has proposed a bill “to make it easier for New Jersey residents to carry handguns, and he thinks the state can make some money in the process.” Currently, you must show “justifiable need” to get a concealed carry permit in New Jersey.

According to the details of his bill, an applicant would have to pass a criminal background check including fingerprinting, take a NJ Police Training Commission approved course in the safe use, storage, and maintenance of a firearm, take a marksmanship qualification test, take another State Police Superintendent approved class on the lawful use of force and justifiable use of a firearm, and then pay an annual fee of $500 for the privilege of carrying concealed.

For this deviation from the party line, Van Drew has been accused by Bryan Miller, the Executive Director of NJ Ceasefire of  “kowtowing to the pro-gun forces of darkness who want to turn this country into an armed society”. I love that phrase – pro-gun forces of darkness. I can just see the T-shirts now.

According to the article at NJ.com, this bill has only a long-shot for passage.

I’m not sure what galls me more – the $500 annual fee so a bankrupt state can meet its pension obligations or that the proponent of a concealed carry bill with incredibly onerous requirements and fees can be thought to be “kowtowing to the pro-gun forces of darkness.”

A proper Kowtow

H/T Cemetary’s Gun Blob

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New Jersey Gun Laws – Ripe for Challenge

August 1, 2010 by

Daniel Schmutter thinks New Jersey’s gun laws are ripe for challenge. He should know. He is the attorney representing the Association of New Jersey Rifle and Pistol Clubs in their lawsuit against the State of New Jersey over the state’s one firearm a month rationing law. He also authored amicus briefs in both the Heller and McDonald cases on behalf of Jews for the Preservation of Firearms.


In an op-ed piece in the second-largest newspaper in New Jersey, The Record, he examines what the McDonald decision means for New Jersey’s restrictive firearms laws. First, he says gun control advocates who say most of the state’s gun laws would pass muster because they are “reasonable restrictions” are wrong. He notes that neither Heller nor McDonald said “reasonable” gun laws are valid under the Second Amendment. Furthermore, “reasonable” is not a legal standard that offers any basis for saying a law would survive a challenge or not.

As it turns out, New Jersey gun law offers fertile ground for challenge, not merely because the state has such strict laws but because New Jersey law is exceedingly aggressive toward the law-abiding gun owner.

New Jersey’s regulatory scheme is highly unusual in that it approaches gun control by categorically banning guns and then carving out extremely limited exceptions to the prohibitions.

Thus, for example, possession of handguns is generally prohibited unless the possession falls within certain narrowly defined exemptions, such as possession inside one’s home or place of business.

This has two main effects. First, it shifts the burden of proving lawful possession to the gun owner. Second, it keeps the circumstances under which one may lawfully possess a handgun very narrow.

Schmutter asks what would happen if one were to substitute “book” for “gun” in the law.  It would force readers and book owners to make absurd contortions in order to exercise a fundamental right. By Schmutter’s hypothetical example, you wouldn’t be allowed to have Tolstoy’s War and Peace because it was a long book and had too many pages (think restrictions on standard capacity magazines) unless you were a Russian lit scholar at Princeton or Rutgers.

He concludes,

The New Jersey Legislature must face the reality that the gun owner and the book owner alike must be treated with equal constitutional dignity. After McDonald, we now see that the emperor has no clothes.

New Jersey gun law is upside down, and if the New Jersey Legislature does not fundamentally reform its scheme of regulating guns, the courts will likely do it for them.