MNGunTalk.com

Another petition is expected later this year or early next year out of the Third Circuit case Rogers v. Attorney General, New Jersey. That petition, in a case being litigated by experienced Supreme Court and Second Amendment lawyers, would also present the critical question relating to citizens’ Second Amendment right to carry firearms. If granted, the petition could be argued next fall, in Justice Kavanaugh’s first full term at the High Court. The Rogers case presents an excellent vehicle for the Court’s review.

1. The Second Amendment to the United States Constitution guarantees “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms.” U.S. CONST. amend. II. When the People, by enacting that amendment, enshrined in their fundamental charter the right to “carry weapons in case of confrontation” for the “core lawful purpose of self-defense,” District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570, 592, 630 (2008), they did not mean to leave the freedom to exercise that right at the mercy of the very government officials whose hands they sought to bind. No, “[t]he very enumeration of the right takes out of the hands of government ... the power to decide on a caseby-case basis whether the right is really worth insisting upon.” Id.

2. In defiance of that constitutional guarantee, New Jersey has seized precisely the power forbidden it by the Second Amendment: the power to decide, on a case-by-case basis, whether an applicant for a permit to “carry weapons in case of confrontation,” id. at 592, has, in their estimation, shown a sufficiently “justifiable need” that a permit should issue, N.J.S.A. 2C:58-4(c).

3. Worse still, New Jersey has made clear that a general desire to carry a handgun for the purpose of self-defense — “the central component” of the Second Amendment, Heller, 554 U.S. at 599 (emphasis added) — is not a sufficiently good reason to exercise the right. Instead, according to New Jersey, an ordinary citizen must establish specific or serious threats or previous attacks which put him in special and unavoidable danger to obtain a permit from the State to carry a firearm in public. That restriction is akin to a state law concluding that the general desire to advocate for lawful political change is not a sufficiently “justifiable need” to exercise the right to free speech, and it cuts to the very core of the Second Amendment, no less than such a restriction would gut the First.

4. Indeed, the practical effect of New Jersey’s “justifiable need” requirement is to make it wholly illegal for typical law-abiding citizens to carry handguns in public — for by definition, these ordinary citizens cannot show that they face a serious or specific, unavoidable threat that poses a special danger to their safety.

Ghost wrote:I think Roberts is with us. The libs may be a man down by then too.

Jackpine Savage wrote:

Ghost wrote:I think Roberts is with us. The libs may be a man down by then too.

He wasn't when it came to Obamacare. I think either he cared too much about left wing opinion, or they blackmailed him.