Gun coalition targets New Jersey’s one-gun-a-month law in new lawsuit

The lawsuit comes almost seven months after a federal judge struck down a similar law in California. (Aristide Economopoulos for New Jersey Monitor)

Since the U.S. Supreme Court in 2022 declared a constitutional right to carry, gun-rights advocates have targeted New Jersey’s famously tough gun laws, challenging one after the other in court, from its assault weapon ban to a prohibition on guns in sensitive places to a law that allows the state to sue gun makers as a public nuisance.

Thursday, they sued again, taking aim this time at a state law barring gun owners from buying more than one firearm a month.

“This case presents a simple question of law. The Second Amendment to the United States Constitution guarantees ‘the right of the people to keep and bear Arms’ — plural — ‘which shall not be infringed,’” attorney Bradley P. Lehman wrote in a federal complaint. “The Constitution contains no limitation on the frequency or number of arms that an individual may lawfully purchase or otherwise acquire — period, let alone in a 30-day period.”

The lawsuit comes almost seven months after a federal judge struck down a similar law in California.

States’ gun restrictions have been toppling around the country in the wake of the landmark 2022 ruling known as Bruen, in which the court’s conservative majority decreed that gun restrictions cannot stand if they weren’t in place when the nation’s forefathers penned the Constitution or are otherwise part of “historical tradition.”

And that is exactly Lehman’s argument. The first such one-gun-a-month law — known as an OGM ban — anywhere in the U.S. passed in 1975, and New Jersey didn’t enact its ban until 2009, Lehman wrote.

Such bans are “not part of the Nation’s historical tradition of firearms regulation,” he added.

He wants a judge to declare the ban unconstitutional and permanently block its enforcement.

The lawsuit was filed by the Nevada-based Firearms Policy Coalition on behalf of Matthew Struck of Morristown and Daniel Francisco of Englishtown. Since Bruen, that coalition has filed lawsuits around the country “aimed at eliminating immoral laws and creating a world of maximal liberty.”

The coalition’s president, Brandon Combs, said his coalition will force New Jersey and every other state to abide by the Second Amendment’s protections.

“It’s been said that ‘as goes California, so goes the nation,’” Combs said. “In this case, California’s ban was properly declared unconstitutional and enjoined from enforcement following years of litigation, and so it will go with all such bans throughout the United States.”

The suit names as defendants New Jersey Attorney General Matt Platkin and Col. Patrick Callahan, superintendent of the New Jersey State Police. A Platkin spokesman declined to comment, and the state police didn’t immediately respond Friday to a request for comment.

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