New Jersey: The Poster Child For National Reciprocity

Opponents of Right-to-Carry reciprocity warn of the mayhem they claim would result. But the truth is that what’s going on in New Jersey now is far more disturbing.

People who only read The New York Times and watch CNN should have no trouble forming an opinion on gun control. They could even feel morally superior in the process. They would be completely insulated from the stories of people—actual, law-abiding citizens who probably have American flags hanging from their porches and who proudly stand for the national anthem—who are being handcuffed and charged with felonies simply because they crossed a state line with a gun they legally own.

It should be easy for people in such a bubble, given their one-sided naiveté, to happily support politicians and editorial boards who claim that concealed-carry reciprocity legislation would do harm, even though none of them have been able to substantiate the likelihood of that harm.

Such a loyal partisan would then find it easy to believe in the doublethink U.S. Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., encourages.

Booker has said that, in his experience when he was the mayor of Newark, N.J.—a city with chronic gang-related murder problems—citizens who legally own guns rarely commit crimes with their firearms. He even explained that gun traces of firearms confiscated at crime scenes in Newark taught him that fact. But then he also said it would be “insane” to pass a federal law allowing people to cross state lines with their legally owned handguns. And he said this even though the proposed law he was referring to would allow a citizen to do this only if the person was legally eligible to carry a concealed firearm in another state.

For those who haven’t read George Orwell lately, “doublethink” is a noun defined as “the acceptance of or mental capacity to accept contrary opinions or beliefs at the same time, especially as a result of political indoctrination.” With politicians like Booker, we need to emphasize the political indoctrination part of this definition.

Outrage Upon Outrage. Some of the examples of how otherwise law-abiding everyday citizens are being treated by New Jersey are so outrageous they wouldn’t work in fiction, as no one would believe their stories could possibly be real.

Consider Brian Fletcher’s legal saga. Fletcher is a resident of North Carolina. He is a co-owner of a company that upgrades and repairs cell towers. He was a first responder after Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans. His trucks often race to the aftermaths of natural disasters to help people get their lives back. The only other time he says he’d been to New Jersey, before being arrested for bringing his gun with him, was to do similar work after Hurricane Sandy hit in 2012. … Fletcher was shocked when the Mercer County Prosecutor’s Office in New Jersey charged him with second-degree unlawful possession of a handgun, a crime that can carry a prison term of five to 10 years.

Christie has pardoned several nonresidents who have faced charges for mistakenly carrying guns in New Jersey. These include a Marine recruiter from Massachusetts named Joshua Velez, whose unloaded 9 mm handgun was found in his locked glove compartment. Velez had been stopped for failing to use a turn signal.

Despite the moral gravity of these cases, many in the New Jersey media have attacked Christie for issuing these pardons. In just one example of many, the New Jersey newspaper The Record, owned by USA Today’s parent company, called the governor’s pardons a “controversial issue that has dogged him on the campaign trail.”

The climate in New Jersey is so out of touch with common sense that not even law-enforcement officers are safe from the state’s gun laws. Sgt. Ray Hughes, a corrections officer in Pennsylvania, was headed home from a concert and dinner in Atlantic City, N.J., with his wife when a drunken driver hit them.

They didn’t receive life-threatening injuries, but they were hurt. Hughes told a responding police officer he had a handgun under his seat. Officers then secured his Glock handgun while he was taken to the hospital. But then, a few days later, Hughes was charged with a felony—a more severe charge than the drunken driver faced.

This overzealous criminalization of gun ownership has even trapped people caught flying through New Jersey.

In 2005, a Utah resident named Gregg C. Revell, who was traveling with a valid Utah Concealed Firearm Permit, was traveling through Newark Airport on his way to Allentown, Pa. He missed a flight and the airline gave him his luggage—which included a properly checked firearm—as he waited for a later flight. He spent a night in a hotel in New Jersey, and when he returned to the airport to check his handgun for his flight, he was arrested for illegal possession of a firearm. Revell lost his case after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit held in Gregg C. Revell v. Port Authority of New York and New Jersey that the federal laws pertaining to travel didn’t protect him because his “firearm and ammunition were readily accessible to him during his stay in New Jersey.”

Given that the Second Amendment, per the McDonald v. Chicago (2010) ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court, is a constitutional right that also restricts state and local governments from infringing on our right to keep and bear arms, there is clearly a need for a federal solution to protect Americans like Fletcher, Revell and Hughes.

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