By Dana DiFilippo
Reprinted with permission
New Jersey Monitor

A federal appeals court on Wednesday largely rejected a constitutional challenge to a 2022 New Jersey law that restricts where gun owners can take their firearms, upholding the state’s ban on guns in parks, beaches, casinos, bars, arenas, and other places deemed “sensitive.”

The lengthy and long-awaited ruling comes almost two years after the state’s attorneys appeared before a panel of U.S. 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals judges to defend the law from gun owners’ claims that its wide-ranging restrictions trample their Second Amendment right to bear arms wherever they go.

Attorney General Matt Platkin said he is “thrilled” by the ruling upholding “this critical public-safety law.”

“The court overwhelmingly agreed with us on almost the entirety of the law, and the very few provisions where it didn’t were, frankly, minor pieces of the statute,” Platkin told the New Jersey Monitor.

He added: “We’re really gratified that the court rejected the gun lobby’s arguments, and they have said that you have a constitutional right under the Second Amendment, but that right doesn’t give you unfettered ability to bring guns into these sensitive places where we know people congregate, where kids congregate, where people drink, where they’re agitated, where fights occur. And that ultimately will keep the public safe.”

The ruling was not a total win for the state, with the judges refusing to uphold a restriction on guns in private vehicles; a requirement that gun owners obtain $300,000 in liability insurance against potential injuries, death, or property damage; and the law’s diversion of $50 in gun permit fees to a fund that compensates crime victims.

The decision was also not unanimous.

Judge Cheryl Ann Krause, an Obama appointee, penned the decision, which Judge Cindy K. Chung, a Biden appointee, joined.

But Judge David J. Porter, a Trump appointee, issued an incendiary dissent accusing his colleagues of “selective reading and overreading of Supreme Court precedent, methodological mistakes, and anachronistic disdain for public carry (which) combine to generate constitutional error.”

Under the majority’s decision, Porter wrote, “most places of human interest in New Jersey and all of its public transportation network are now gun-free zones.” That violates people’s right to bear arms in public for self-defense, he wrote.

The ruling upholds the state’s ban on guns in most of the “sensitive places” legislators listed in the law, including: zoos, parks, beaches, playgrounds and recreational facilities, libraries, museums, places that serve alcohol, entertainment facilities, casinos, medical offices, public transit, within 100 feet of public gatherings, and private homes and businesses not open to the public.

The judges also upheld the law’s requirement that permit applicants provide four references attesting to their good character.

The Firearms Policy Coalition, one of the law’s challengers, said in a statement its members are reviewing the decision “with our objective unchanged: to end New Jersey’s immoral and unconstitutional carry bans.”

“While today’s ruling offers a partial but important recognition of our position and acknowledges serious defects in the State’s laws, it does not go nearly far enough,” the statement read. “FPC remains committed to proving — when this case moves to final judgment — that these restrictions are an assault on peaceable people and must be struck down permanently.”

Scott Bach is executive director of the Association of New Jersey Rifle and Pistol Clubs, another group that challenged the law. He described the ruling as “a mixed decision that splits the baby on what is supposed to be a bedrock fundamental right.”

“It undermines the Constitutionally guaranteed right-to-carry, and this approach will ultimately wind up in the trash bin of history,” Bach said in a statement.

The group also specifically lamented the carry ban on public transportation, saying it blocks self-defense rights “in one of the areas where they are needed most.”

Historic tradition

Much of the gun owners’ fight against the new law was rooted in a June 2022 landmark decision, known as Bruen, in which the U.S. Supreme Court struck down New York’s requirement that gun owners show “proper cause” to obtain carry permits.

That decision toppled such requirements nationally, including in New Jersey, which had long barred most gun owners from taking their firearms outside their home or business unless they could prove they had a “justifiable need” to do so.

Bruen rooted its reasoning in the nation’s “historical tradition” of gun rights. In the majority’s 139-page ruling, Krause documented over dozens of pages the historical tradition of gun regulations going back more than five centuries to early England, and later colonial America, the nation’s founding, the antebellum period, and the Reconstruction era

“Throughout our Nation’s history, the People have time and time again opted to limit the use of firearms at specific venues set aside for civic purposes, namely, governmental and democratic functions, and public places akin to the fairs and markets of old,” Krause wrote

She added: “By imposing permitting requirements and restricting when and where firearms can be carried, our democratically elected leaders acknowledge that there are tradeoffs between the protections of the Second Amendment and fellow citizens’ enjoyment of functional government and a host of other constitutionally enshrined rights, including the right to speak, worship, protest, and vote.

Krause seemed frustrated to be framing their consideration of the case in a historical context, noting that elected officials who have balanced gun-carry rights with public safety protections considered “modern circumstances, and the desires of the People today.

“It is ironic that we, who are neither elected officials nor historians, may not consider that balancing but only the extent to which it resembles the balancing of legislatures in bygone eras,” Krause wrote. “Nevertheless, we have done our best to distill the principles of our Nation’s tradition of firearm regulation from the available historical record, and what we have found convinces us that New Jersey’s law, at least in part, continues that tradition.”

Krause noted that the world is far different than it was when colonial lawmakers wrote the Constitution. Firearm technology has advanced, population density has increased, and gun violence has risen and become more lethal, she wrote. Mass shootings now happen almost daily, she added.

“Our society has evolved considerably since the Nation’s earliest days. Many of the ‘general societal problem[s]’ that contemporary firearm regulations aim to address did not exist during the Founding and Reconstruction eras,” she wrote.

The legal fight dates back to December 2022, when Gov. Phil Murphy signed the law and gun owners almost immediately sued to block it.

A federal judge in Camden in early 2023 suspended many of the law’s provisions, but the appellate court quickly paused her injunction, pending appeal. That allowed the state to enforce much of the law, including the sensitive places restrictions.

Wednesday’s ruling clears the way for the state to continue enforcing the law. Platkin said he would issue guidance to law enforcement officers so that they’re clear on what the ruling means, and which restrictions remain in place and which do not.

If the gun owners press their cause further, the case ultimately could end up before the U.S. Supreme Court, where a conservative majority rules.

Gun advocates instead should “just work to actually reduce gun violence in our state,” Platkin said.

But he’s not worried about the law’s fate if the legal battle continues, saying there’s “a clear historical practice supporting what the statute does, and we have shown that time and time again.”

“As you read through a very lengthy and detailed and I think very well-reasoned opinion, I think it shows that under the Bruen framework, these types of common-sense restrictions passed by a democratically elected legislature consistent with restrictions placed by democratically elected bodies for, in some cases, centuries, can continue to remain in effect,” Platkin said.