A federal judge in New Jersey on Tuesday granted a preliminary injunction in part against certain tenets in the Garden State’s revised gun permit law, Chapter 131, handing out a victory for the Second Amendment Foundation and its partners in the lawsuit.
In her meticulously researched 235-page ruling, US District Court Chief Judge Renee Marie Bumb writes: “The Constitution leaves some measures to the states to combat gun violence. But what the Second Amendment prohibits states from doing, and what the State of New Jersey has done here with much of Chapter 131, is “to prevent law-abiding citizens with ordinary needs for self-defense from exercising their right to possess and bear arms. .’ That is clearly unconstitutional.
“Bruen required the state to make its firearms laws compliant with the Second Amendment,” Judge Bumb adds. “Chapter 131 was the State’s response, but it went too far, becoming the kind of law Founding Father Thomas Jefferson would have warned against since it ‘disarms[s] only those who are not inclined or determined to commit a crime [and] worsen[s] the difficult situation of the victims, but to improve[s] those of the assailants’”.
SAF joins in this case the New Jersey Coalition of Gun Owners, the New Jersey Second Amendment Society, the Firearms Policy Coalition, and three private citizens, Nicholas Gaudio, Jeffrey Muller, and Ronald Koons. , the latter for whom the case, Koons v. Platkin, is named. They are represented by attorney David Jensen of Beacon, NY
“Judge Bumb’s ruling clearly acknowledges the issues we raise with New Jersey’s restrictive gun law, and has fired a legal shot into the state’s bow,” said SAF Founder and Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb. “When New Jersey passed Chapter 131, it removed the ‘good need’ requirement, but replaced it with an equally egregious ‘sensitive locations’ restriction to effectively prohibit carrying a legally licensed firearm anywhere in the state. That just doesn’t pass the sniff test.”
“Judge Bumb’s ruling clearly acknowledges the issues we raise with New Jersey’s restrictive gun law, and has fired a legal shot into the state’s bow,” said SAF Founder and Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb. “When New Jersey passed Chapter 131, it removed the ‘good need’ requirement, but replaced it with an equally egregious ‘sensitive locations’ restriction to effectively prohibit carrying a legally licensed firearm anywhere in the state. That just doesn’t pass the sniff test.”