As we reported yesterday, the Senate Law & Public Safety Committee has gun control on the schedule for Thursday, and a second bill will only pile on to the already bad agenda. S.372 will require all new residents to get an FID card within 30 days and register any guns they might be bringing with them.
The following is perhaps the slight bit of humor that can be extracted from this bad news. New Jersey anti-gun politicians are so oblivious to reality that they are concerned about people moving INTO New Jersey! The reality is that New Jersey annually tops the list of “most-moved-out-of” states in the country. In fact, in the 2018 Allied Moving Vans survey, New Jersey was #1 in the country, topping the list of states with outbound moves. Instead of fixing the real problems identified in those surveys (poor roads and infrastructure, stifling taxes and high cost of living), your elected officials continue wasting time harassing law-abiding gun owners. New Jersey already has some of the toughest gun laws in the country, and based on the time Majority Democrats fixate on them, they clearly are not working. Understandably, voters in the Garden State have had enough and last November they spoke loudly on that issue.
In addition to being conceptually bad, this bill is so poorly crafted it has glaring and obvious inconsistencies with current law. This bill requires new residents to register all firearms. Under current law, there is no requirement to register long guns. This bill also treats current residents differently, as there are categories of handguns held by citizens which do not have to be registered (i.e. inherited guns, antiques and relics, etc.) Under this bill, current residents would not have to register those guns, but new residents would. This is simply evidence that whoever wrote this bill had a complete lack of knowledge of what current law actually requires. Now, lawmakers are quickly trying to jam this through in a short, lame duck session. These are just some of the many problems with this bill.
S.372 would do nothing to enhance public safety. It would require registration into a long gun database which does not exist and would have to be created. Presumably, another government-run program for which New Jersey taxpayers would foot the bill.
Please contact your state Senator immediately and respectfully ask them to oppose this bill. This bill is gun registration, would do nothing to impact public safety, is a massive waste of money, and would make a mess of state statutes. Please request a “NO” vote on S.372.