A federal judge has granted a preliminary injunction, in part, to plaintiffs in a challenge of New Jersey’s new gun control scheme.
U.S.A. — A federal judge in New Jersey Tuesday granted in part and denied in part a preliminary injunction against tenets of Chapter 131, the state’s controversial new handgun permit law, saying that the statute prevents “law-abiding citizens with ordinary self-defense needs from exercising their right to keep and bear arms” which is “plainly unconstitutional.”
New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin quickly filed an appeal.
Chief U.S. District Judge Renee Marie Bumb released a 235-page ruling that details the challenges to New Jersey’s law, adopted in reaction to last year’s Supreme Court ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, which struck down neighboring New York’s similar permitting law. The judge made some scathing observations about the state’s handling of this case.
“Moreover, instead of presenting the compelling historical evidence they promised,” she observes at one point, “the State and the Legislature-Intervenors have spent their resources writing a narrative that says, absent the Court’s indiscriminate approval of the new legislation, “[t]he risk of dangerous and often fatal situations looms large.”…It is rhetoric that is not productive, particularly for this Court’s role here. This Court is painfully aware of the gun violence that has plagued our Nation. But what the State and the Legislature-Intervenors ignore, and what their empirical evidence fails to address, is that this legislation is aimed primarily—not at those who unlawfully possess firearms—but at law-abiding, responsible citizens who satisfy detailed background and training requirements and whom the State seeks to prevent from carrying a firearm in public for self-defense…
By Dean Workman
