October 6, 2008

The Myth of “One-Gun-A-MONTH”

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The Mayor of Jersey City, New Jersey, has been pushing hard for a "one-gun-a-month" restriction
in his city. While the courts have rejected his attempts to preempt New Jersey
law, the mayor is now forging ahead by lobbying
the state legislature to curtail the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding
Garden State residents.

One-Gun-A-Month is a bad policy anyway you look at it. Not only does it
rob citizens of a fundamental, consitutionally guaranteed right, but it doesn’t
curb crime either. Consider this, taken from an NSSF letter to the editor
submitted this morning:

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the significant drop in crime
during the mid-1990’s coincided with more guns being in private possession
and more restrictive guns laws being taken off the books. In South Carolina,
one-gun-a-month was repealed (allowing for more guns in the hands of law-abiding
citizens) and, like the rest of the U.S., South Carolinians experienced a
decrease in violent crime. Furthermore, a recent study by the Center for
Disease Control looked at the full panoply of gun control measures and concluded
that none could be proven to reduce crime.

Limiting the sale of firearms to law-abiding New Jerseyians in the name of
curbing violent crime is ill-conceived and, following the recent Supreme
Court decision in Washington, D.C. v. Heller, it is tantamount to rationing
a civil right on par with Freedom of Religion and Freedom of the Press. Read
the complete letter.

In more positive news — the Newark Star Ledger ran an editorial
knocking "one-gun-a-month." It’s hard not to see this success
as a direct result of an earlier editorial board meeting we had with the
Top 20 Newspaper.

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