New Jersey's Restrictions on Public Gun Possession Are 'Plainly Unconstitutional,' a Federal Judge Says
The state defied a Supreme Court ruling by banning guns from myriad "sensitive places."
After the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the right to bear arms last June, New Jersey responded the same way New York did: by making it easier to obtain a carry permit but much harder to use it. "Although an individual seeking to carry a handgun for self-defense is no longer required to show a 'justifiable need,'" U.S. District Judge Renée Marie Bumb notes, "the State's expansive list of 'sensitive places' effectively prohibits the carrying of that handgun virtually everywhere in New Jersey." The message to gun owners, Bumb says, was pretty clear: "leave your Second Amendment rights and guns at home."
The preliminary injunction that Bumb issued yesterday, which follows a temporary restraining order that she granted in January, is the latest judicial rebuke of legislative attempts to defy the Supreme Court's June 23 ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen while pretending to comply with it. New Jersey politicians, like their counterparts in New York, are discovering that federal judges are not inclined to approve that transparent end run.
"Clearly, the State disagrees with Bruen," Bumb writes in her 235-page opinion. "But it cannot disobey the Supreme Court by declaring most of New Jersey off limits for law-abiding citizens who have the constitutional right to armed self-defense."
