Despite 500 people showing up during a snowstorm on Wednesday to protest, the committee went ahead with a vote anyway, and passed 20 or so horrible bills out of committee. ANJRPC notes:
Bills set to move to full Assembly Vote On Thursday, February 21. Please start contacting both of your Assembly Members and urge them not to support any new anti-gun measures. Thank you to the 500 Second Amendment supporters who attended today’s hearings and held legislators’ feet to the fire!
Those bills are listed here. Let me translate this for you. In order, they would:
- AB588 – Ban most rifle ammunition.
- A1116 – Must report lost and stolen firearms to police. Fines and a 180 day firearm purchase prohibition for violators.
- A1329 – Reduce magazine capacity from 15 to 10 rounds. No grandfathering.
- A1387 – Weapon free “safety zones” within 1000 feet around public property like schools, parks, public housing, or other public buildings. Specifically applies to unknowingly being within 1000 feet.
- A1613 – Bullshit task force.
- A3510 – Requires training to purchase a firearm and for FID cards.
- A3583 – Another bullshit task force.
- A3645 – Requires face-to-face transactions for ammo.
- A3646 – Licensing for ammunition vendors.
- A3659 – Weapons 50 caliber or larger are destructive devices.
- A3666 – Mail order of ammunition prohibited.
- A3668 – Prohibits state investments in companies that make so-called “assault weapons.”
- A3687 – No guns for people who are on a secret government list.
- A3717 – Submit mental health records to NICS.
- A3748 – End private sales. There were private sales in NJ?
- A3750 – All ammunition sales registered and reported to the State Police.
- A3754 – Allows mental health professionals to order firearms be seized form patients. This will ensure no one who owns guns seeks mental health treatment, even if they may need it.
- A3772 – Require picture ID on FID cards.
- A3788 – Abolish access to firearm records. This one actually looks good.
- A3796 – Allows 90 days to dispose of unlawful firearms.
- A3797 – Requires reporting of ballistics data for seized guns to federal system.
- ACR180 – Bullshit resolution urging feds to shit on your rights.
- AR143 – Bullshit resolution supporting gun buybacks.
- AR144 – Bullshit resolution on mental health.
It seems all these states are using the same playbook.
I can just imagine the court cases, and challenges to these laws, and how long this will all be tied up.
Politicians are just throwing everything out there , knowing some things are going to be knocked down as unconstitutional.
Too bad the lawmakers don’t have to pay court costs,personally if the law is found to violate the Constitution.
I think we need to build a new base for a pro-gun push that would preempt certain state laws under Congress’s power under the 14th Amendment.
If you can suggest a “wording” or can come up with a template, Im willing to send letters and e-mails to all Congressman, starting with my own.
Were lucky it hasn’t gotten quite as insane here in Pa. Yet.
I;m sure that I am not the only one who is sick of feeling like we are under attack, when just last November we were pretty much left alone.
I’m willing to write letters , go to organized protests and anything else.
Its not enough to just bitch in blog comments.
We all need to be active , and call write and show up, and join as many pro 2nd Amend. Orgs as possible.
Its really not just about the 2ndAmendment anymore…its about all of our rights.
“shall not be infringed”…
“What do you think George?”
“Well Tom sounds good to me, Sam?”
“I’ll drink to that!”
AB588 will also ban slingshots, stun guns and handcuffs. It’s not just “armor piercing” ammo.
What a freak place to live in if this passes.
Maybe it can be challenged on right to privacy grounds? My boy- and/or girlfriend and/or 50 Shades Book Club have a right to handcuffs in the privacy of our home! (My safe-word is “Apples.”)
Gun owners in NJ either need to pop smoke to signal the LZ for the emergency exfil chopper, or they need to pop smoke to signal where to drop the pallet of standard capacity mags and the green beret team.
The legislature’s intent is to make it incredibly legally hazardous to own a firearm in NJ. The law abiding gun owner who even just wants to have and use a deer rifle or shotgun at this point much less a standard sidearm runs a huge legal risk. It is either time to leave or time to start widespread non-compliance.
See, this is why they invented the “Liberator” pistol — and why it’s so difficult to one one. Or the Vietnam War equivalent.
Typo — I meant “to OWN one.” Sigh.
Why does it seem that the whole nation is going crazy on guns? it feels like payback to me. No matter what we say, they don’t listen. No matter what little good their laws will do, they don’t care. I feel like “the other” here, the bad guy, the one who is to blame for all the trouble in this nation. And I look around and think, what trouble? Like a bunch of people are standing around a perfectly good window and somebody comes up and says, “who broke this window?” and everyone is pointing at me. What the hell, man, the window is not broken. I know that’s what they want us to feel, but why? Is our independence and our slightly-in-the-minority-this-year voting habits *that* much of an offense to them that they have to make us pay?
What offends them is that we disagree with them. Anything less than enthusiastic agreement sends them into a raging fury.
Ok, I get that. It just sucks. I’m going to go ahead and go partial-Goodwin here and ask- does it seem to anyone else that liberals are intent on turning gun owners into the new Jews? Eliminationist rhetoric, regulating them out of existence, talk of disarming the resistors, whats next?
Remember, kids, politicians prefer to deal with unarmed peasants. That’s why the Governing Class is pissed off.
I’m afraid our day in PA may be coming, but in terms of flashbacks, I’m getting the same feeling I remember having when NJ passed its first big batch of gun control laws back in 1967. I was overseas in the Army, read about it in the “Stars and Stripes,” and most of us were stunned by the news. The magnitude of what was being legislated at the time seemed equally sweeping.
I fear that NJ gun owners (like the rest of us) have been too polite, for too long. Rights are being ripped away by the fistful, and I still hear people patting themselves on the back for holding rallies where no one so much as left a gum wrapper on the pavement. Good boys. Good Grief!
…and what else would you have the gun owners of NJ do, eh?
Move to Texas.
I’d love to see a study to prove the slippery slope. A state by state comparison of new gun control laws introduced vs. brady score. It would show that the more gun control you have already, the more you are going to get. We are all in for a big fight, but the one inevitability that will come from the sandy hook tragedy is that the most restrictive areas are going to get a whole lot more restrictive.
The problem with that is, it would be an interesting study for sure, but purely academic. The only people convinced would be, the people that started out needing no convincing.
Another problem is, per my flashbacks about 1967, above, is that sometimes the slope has been very gradual. If you are into your seventh decade, and life seems to have gone by in a flash, what happened almost 50 years ago is plainly the beginning of a slope. When you’re entering middle age, and the event was almost a decade before you were born, it is not so persuasive as part of the data set.
Damn, they’re almost as be as the UK. Does that mean that from now on people there will be referred to as “subjects of New Jersey”?
Practical suggestion to brainstorm:
Perhaps PA clubs with a good representation of NJ members should start gearing up to provide storage facilities for their equipment — at least while that equipment remains legal in PA or the U.S.
It would be expensive, but we can’t fight this battle cost-free!
And yet that is something that would not help gun rights in NJ at all. Avoiding the problem of restrictive laws does not help. This needs to be fought. NJ gun owners should simply not comply. No one should. It’s the last resort.
Oh, I agree with what NJ gun owners should do. But, our crowd is made up of all sorts of people with all sorts of personalities. So, for those who want to stop short of dying in the street, helping them subvert the system — keeping their contraband, just across the border — would not be entirely without value. I’d actually get a kick out of hearing the whines about how Pennsylvanians were helping Thought Criminals to evade the law.
Even the IRA, which had more balls than all of us, kept some of its weapons across the border in The Republic.
For long arms, private sale is pretty easy. Show FPID, fill out a form available as PDF to be kept by seller, and I’m not even sure it needs to be filed with the state in duplicate. Handgun private transfer is almost as easy, except the seller has to file parts of the permit to purchase with the state.
“Bullshit Taskforce” would be a pretty good name for blog, if I may update an old Dave Barry joke.