Cemetery reports, with some charts, on a fairly significant rise in people being issued Firearms Owners ID cards, and permits to purchase handguns in Morris County, New Jersey. One thing to consider is that FID cards are good for life, so these issuances represent new gun owners, which increased 57% from 2006 to 2008, and are on track to increase a further 78% from 2008 to 2009 if the trend holds.
I think a lot more of the Great Obama Gun Rush may have been first time buyers than we realized. I hate New Jersey’s permitting and licensing system, but it is useful to be able to track trends, and the trends seems to be a lot of new gun owners, even in the Garden State, albeit in traditionally a Republican county. Given how hard Bryan Miller had to work to pass gun rationing, these numbers can’t make him feel good about future prospects.
My wife just went to pick her (address-changed) card; and noted that there were about a dozen names on the sign-out log other than hers and mine.
(I go get mine later this week – since the cards are fingerprinted, she couldn’t pick up mine)
Massachusetts FID cards used to be for life too. When the laws changed in 1998, hundreds of thousands of instant felons were created. I still encounter one from time to time now, over a decade later.
They aren’t felons. Possession on an expired FID isn’t a felony. In fact, you can go get one even if you’ve been found guilty of possession on an expired one.
I stand corrected. I was unaware of C140S129B (12).
I’m trying to track down if a pre-98 FID covered guns that aren’t covered under a current FID. Was the concept of ‘large capacity’ a 1998 addition, or did it exist before that? (I first moved to MA in 2000 and only became a gun owner in 2007.)
Aside: the fact that I found legal analysis an entirely normal response and that I knew right where to go looking for the relevant law says a lot about what it’s like to be a gun owner in MA.
It’s not any different than being a gun owner in NJ, CA, NY or any other extremely anti-gun area. You have to know the law, and the MA laws are all together in one section, so it’s to be expected.
If you’re looking for the history of various licensing structures in MA, you’re going to have to go back a very long time. IIRC (and it’s been years, so I might be off by a few years on dates), but you’ll have to look at FID laws going back to around ’68 and LTC laws going back to around 1907.
I can find the NJ gun laws pretty quickly on NJ’s legislature’s website now; myself. Ignorance being no excuse, I felt I had to become at least moderately educated