From Our Side in New Jersey

Scott Bach talks about some of the recent changes in New Jersey that Bryan Miller and CeaseFire New Jersey are suggesting target only criminals:

So what’s the problem, you ask? The problem is that the Garden State’s gun laws are a tangled web of hypertechnical, complex, and frequently incomprehensible regulations that often have the effect of ensnaring otherwise law-abiding citizens and turning them into inadvertent criminals.

New Jersey regulates firearms by banning everything first, and then carving out extremely narrow, limited, and stingy exemptions. Fall outside those exemptions, and you’re considered a criminal, no matter how upstanding a citizen you may otherwise be.

Read the whole thing.  This is what the anti-gun folks want to bring to the rest of the country.  These are what they consider “reasonable” and necessary gun control laws.  Yet Bryan Miller has the audacity to claim:

Why do I care? Not because of any disdain or dislike for hunting or sport shooting. Although I do neither, I don’t oppose either. Hunting is a traditional American pursuit dating back to the first settlers, and I see no reason to seek its demise, as long as it is pursued lawfully and meets the demands of the community in which it occurs. I feel similarly about sport shooting.

Furthermore, hunters and sportsmen are generally not responsible for the unacceptably high rate of gun violence we face in this country, so I have little interest, frankly, in their guns.

If Bryan is sincere in this, would he be willing to agree to re-engineer New Jersey’s gun laws so that they won’t so easily entrap honest sports shooters?   You can bet the answer is no.  Bryan cheers Joyce funded studies that show declining gun ownership.  If gun ownership is on the decline in New Jersey, which I would bet it is, it’s driven largely by the laws which make owning a firearm for lawful purposes a hazardous legal undertaking.  It’s hard to get into the shooting sports in New Jersey without talking to a lawyer, and that’s just fine by the gun control groups there.