Newly installed New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D) is following up on Chris Christie’s (R) bump stock ban by pushing a sales tax on gun sales and a mandatory firearm safety training requirement for gun owners.
The sales tax will be one be factor making gun ownership cost prohibitive for poorer New Jersey residents and the mandatory training requirement will be one more mechanism by which a government regulates a right that “shall not be infringed.”
Newsweek reports that both gun controls are at the top of Murphy’s to-do list, as is a new gun control expanding regulations on the transfer of firearms. (Such regulations not only increase government oversight of the exercise of the Second Amendment but also enhance the paper trail on firearms, thereby providing bureaucrats and government officials with a better idea of the names of law-abiding citizens who own guns and the location at which those guns are kept.)
News of Murphy’s gun control push came the day after outgoing Gov. Chris Christie used one of his final acts in officer to ban the possession of bump stock accessories. The use of the accessories was already banned in the state and, without pointing to one violation of that ban, Christie signed a bill giving law-abiding New Jersey residents 90 days to surrender their bump stocks or else.
The ban was ubiquitously framed as a response to the October 1, 2017, Las Vegas attack, but was broadened to include a ban on trigger cranks, which were not even used in the Las Vegas attack.
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News, the host of the Breitbart podcast Bullets, and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com. Sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange.