New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has 7 days to act on the remaining gun-control bills on his desk. He has told reporters that he intends to act on the bills before the deadline. On August 19, the State Senate will reconvene. Since S2723 originated in the Senate, Christie will have to veto or sign this gun control bill by then, or it automatically becomes law.

S2723 is the brainchild of Senate President Steve Sweeney. It is meant to fix NJ’s arduous firearm purchasing permit process. It seeks to streamline the process by bringing NJ’s 1960’s gun laws into the 21st century. However there is a serious problem with digitizing NJ’s FID cards. Since Gov. Christie already signed A3788 which removed firearms permits from the public record. This is actually common sense, given recent history. The New York Journal News was thrust into the spotlight when it published an interactive map of the county’s gun owners. Gov. Christie is right to respect the privacy of NJ’s 1 million gun owners. Which makes me wonder why he would even consider encoding a firearms permit onto a drivers’ licenses. If it is there, it can be read. And no one has any business knowing whether I have been granted permission to purchase a firearm. S2723 should be vetoed because of this privacy concern alone…

Privacy concerns, however are trumped by S2723’s blatant unconstitutionality. Section 7 reads that a future applicant "shall not be issued his [or her] first permit to purchase a handgun or his [or her] first firearms purchaser identification card unless the applicant presents evidence of successfully completing a firearms safety class or course of a type approved by the superintendent.“ How can anyone support this legislation? It is blatantly unconstitutional to mandate training to exercise a fundamental, constitutional right. It is one thing to mandate training for a permit to carry a handgun. While practically no one can prove a "justifiable need” to protect themselves in the State of New Jersey, anyone who does should be forced to take a firearms safety and training course. But that is not what S2723 is about. S2723 is about forcing law-abiding citizens to pass a test before they can receive permission to exercise their fundamental right to purchase a firearm. These are Jim Crow tactics. Like the Jim Crow laws, they don’t technically make it illegal to purchase a firearm and exercise your right. But they place unconstitutional burdens on people in the hope that the process will become so complicated that they will give up. Just as you cannot force people to take a public speaking course before they are allowed to give a speech, it is unconscionable to force people to take a training course in order to exercise their fundamental right to keep and bear arms.



But let’s look at this for a minute and imagine that this testing requirement is completely constitutional. How can you possibly mandate people receive training on a gun that isn’t theirs? As someone who has taken multiple firearms safety and training courses, I can tell you that I did so to learn how to properly use MY rifles. Common sense would dictate that if you want to promote safe gun ownership, people should understand the guns that they are going to own. Aside from this bill being unconstitutional, it is foolish to suggest that people train prior to possessing their own firearm. There is no such thing as one-size fits all firearms training.



I voted for Gov. Christie. I supported him through the pension reform and the Hurricane response. But I cannot, in good conscience, support anyone who erodes constitutional liberties in order to present the people of New Jersey with some false-sense of security.

To Contact Gov. Christie, email chris.christie@gov.state.nj.us or call 609-292-6000