....that is, unless you want to get all ex post facto about it:
New Jersey's strict gun laws are leading to the arrest and in some cases incarceration of people for possessing guns they are legally entitled to own.
Shaneen Allen, a 27-year-old mother of two from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, with no prior criminal record, was driving to Atlantic City in neighboring New Jersey in October when she was pulled over by police.
She was carrying a gun she had purchased legally a week earlier for protection after being robbed twice, and had a concealed carry permit from Pennsylvania.
Nevertheless, Allen was arrested in New Jersey for unlawful possession of a weapon and is facing three years in prison.
"I'm very much worried because I have two kids who depend on me," Allen, who is hoping for leniency from the judge in the case, told Fox News. [emphasis added]
Call me naive or in desperate need of "LegalZoom," but if Miss Allen - whose case I wrote about at the time - is not a New Jersey resident, and did not purchase her gun in New Jersey, and legally owns it in Pennsylvania, just exactly how does New Jersey have jurisdiction over either one? Is she really barred from the Garden State for life until such time as she divests herself of her firearm? And, bringing it with her anyway on a brief trip in-State, now she's deserving over over a decade in the slammer (not just three years)? Something that would orphan her two children and make them wards of the....State.
Hmmm; maybe it does make some twisted sense at that.
But it isn't just unsuspecting visitors to the State "to kiss her where it smells" that are caught in the lunatic dragnet:
New Jersey resident Brian Aitken was arrested in 2009 while transporting locked up and unloaded guns legally purchased in Colorado from one residence to another, and was sentenced to seven years in prison.
His sentence was commuted by Governor Chris Christie in 2010 [i.e. right after Democrat predecessor John Korzine left office] after Aitken had served four months, but the commutation does not expunge his conviction and as a result he has been denied access to his young son for the past four years.
"Until my case is resolved I can't vote or pass a background check. It's next to impossible to get a credit card or even sign a lease for an apartment," writes Aitken, who wants to take his case to the Supreme Court. "I can't leave the county and I can't see my son."
"Tens of thousands of gun owners in New Jersey remain at risk of becoming thrown in prison simply for transporting something they legally own from one residence to another."
Now before you start thinking I'm going to mention the Second Amendment, this is not a federal issue, it is a State issue, and unless the New Jersey constitution has its equivalent of the the Second Amendment, New Jersey can enact - constitutionally speaking - whatever gun laws it wants.
But...is the above not stark raving insane? How is it in the public interest - much less the antithesis of simply human decency - to practically hunt legal gun owners for sport? How does it bolster public safety? Does it not do precisely the opposite by so disincentivizing gun ownership even in other States that aren't run by pacifist, pro-crime lunatics that any legal gun owner who ever has reason or cause to enter the Garden State either has to permanently exile themselves from it or voluntarily rid themselves of their only means of self-protection?
It's almost as if New Jersey can't wait for Barack Obama to decree nationwide gun confiscation, so they're determined to export their anti-gun nuttery to the greatest extent they can possibly manage. A trend that, via horror stories and the publicity they richly merit, can, God willing, be summarily reversed.
Exit thought: This doesn't look too awfully good in Governor Christie's presidential resume, does it?
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