Yesterday, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a challenge to NY’s gun laws in NY State Rifle & Pistol, et al. v. New York, NY, et al.

Here’s the Question Presented:

Whether the City’s ban on transporting a licensed, locked, and unloaded handgun to a home or shooting range outside city limits is consistent with the Second Amendment, the Commerce Clause, and the constitutional right to travel.

Question Presented is available on the Supreme Court website here: https://www.supremecourt.gov/qp/18-00280qp.pdf

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I once lent my car to a friend for a week and it wound up getting towed.  He parked it in a legal spot and several days later, they changed the sign over the car.  My friend never got a notice that they were changing the sign, but off the car went to the impound lot.

There’s no shortage of public opinion on what should be done when it comes to the issue of gun control.  Yesterday, a set of bills were signed into law by the governor (with a lawsuit promptly filed).

But one of them, the 10 round magazine limit, will have unintended consequences due to the lack of notification to citizens and possibly the Graves Act.  The public should be aware of this before it becomes effective and the law should be updated.

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Here, in NJ, law abiding gun owners sometimes find themselves in the crosshairs of the criminal justice system for having hyper-technical infractions of an amazingly complex set of laws.  As if the situation wasn’t worthy of attention for that fact alone, memoranda such as the Graves Act memo promulgated by the State Attorney General’s office remove relief valves such as pre-trial intervention, leaving nothing but prison terms remaining for people that make simple mistakes.

A couple of years ago, some high profile cases from out-of-state caused the AG to revise their Graves act memorandum.  In the 2014 Graves Act Clarification memo, NJ stated:

Recent events have focused public attention on how prosecutors exercise discretion in cases where a resident of another state brings into New Jersey a firearm that had been acquired lawfully and that could be carried lawfully by that visitor in the visitor’s home jurisdiction.  Under current New Jersey law, these otherwise law-abiding persons are subject not only to arrest, prosecution and conviction for unlawful possession of a firearm, but also to enhanced punishment – a mandatory minimum State Prison sentence – under the “Graves Act”.

It calls such this “neither necessary nor appropriate”.

Quite right.

But NJ is now considering changes to the laws that affect residents.  One of them in particular will change the Continue reading →