After a panel of the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals rejected gun owners’ attempt to topple New Jersey’s laws against constitutional carry, they are taking their fight to the entire court. Dana DiFilippo reports in the New Jersey Monitor:
Gun owners who last month lost their fight to topple a 2022 state law banning guns in sensitive places are asking the full 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals to hear the case again, saying a three-judge appellate panel erred in upholding carry restrictions on “nearly every inch of public space in New Jersey.”
Attorneys representing Ronald Koons, Aaron Siegel, and other unnamed gun owners argued Wednesday that the panel’s Sept. 10 precedential split decision conflicts with a 2022 U.S. Supreme Court decision that declared gun carry a constitutional right. In a ruling known as Bruen, the nation’s top court barred states from requiring carry permit applicants to prove a need to take their gun outside their home or business.
“By the (3rd Circuit) panel’s admission, the issues this case presents carry ‘immense public importance.’ Yet the panel got several of these exceptionally important issues exceptionally wrong,” the attorneys wrote.
They added: “The panel opinion transforms a fundamental constitutional right into a mere privilege that states can withhold at will.”
Bruen required policymakers to root any gun restrictions in the history and tradition that existed when the nation’s forefathers drafted the Second Amendment, the attorneys noted. In their petition, they quote liberally from a fiery dissent penned by Judge David J. Porter, a Trump appointee who accused the other two jurists on his panel — both appointed by Democrats — of various errors and an “anachronistic disdain for public carry.”
“The panel here refused to treat ‘the Second Amendment’s meaning as fixed at the Founding or at the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification,’ and instead relied on ‘late-blooming regulations unconnected to early-American tradition,’” the attorneys wrote, citing Porter’s dissent.
The majority decision by Judges Cheryl Ann Krause and Cindy K. Chung was “premised on the assumption that bearing arms for self-defense is a public nuisance rather than a constitutional right,” the attorneys argued.
Action Line: Your right to bear arms in self-defense is only a nuisance to criminals and those who want to erase your freedoms. It’s possible that this case could unlock constitutional carry for Americans in states across the country. Already, 29 states have protected their residents’ right to carry firearms, and North Carolina could be the 30th. Whatever your state’s laws are, you can get your gun and your training now. And click here to subscribe to my free monthly Survive & Thrive letter.
