Gun owners last month lost their constitutional challenge of a New Jersey law banning guns in sensitive places. They want another day in court. (Dana DiFilippo | New Jersey Monitor)
Gun owners who last month lost their fight to topple a 2022 state law banning guns in sensitive places are asking the full 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals to hear the case again, saying a three-judge appellate panel erred in upholding carry restrictions on “nearly every inch of public space in New Jersey.”
Attorneys representing Ronald Koons, Aaron Siegel, and other unnamed gun owners argued Wednesday that the panel’s Sept. 10 precedential split decision conflicts with a 2022 U.S. Supreme Court decision that declared gun carry a constitutional right. In a ruling known as Bruen, the nation’s top court barred states from requiring carry permit applicants to prove a need to take their gun outside their home or business.
“By the (3rd Circuit) panel’s admission, the issues this case presents carry ‘immense public importance.’ Yet the panel got several of these exceptionally important issues exceptionally wrong,” the attorneys wrote.
They added: “The panel opinion transforms a fundamental constitutional right into a mere privilege that states can withhold at will.”
Bruen required policymakers to root any gun restrictions in the history and tradition that existed when the nation’s forefathers drafted the Second Amendment, the attorneys noted. In their petition, they quote liberally from a fiery dissent penned by Judge David J. Porter, a Trump appointee who accused the other two jurists on his panel — both appointed by Democrats — of various errors and an “anachronistic disdain for public carry.”
“The panel here refused to treat ‘the Second Amendment’s meaning as fixed at the Founding or at the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification,’ and instead relied on ‘late-blooming regulations unconnected to early-American tradition,’” the attorneys wrote, citing Porter’s dissent.
Spokespeople for the state attorney general’s office, which has fought to uphold the law, did not respond to a request for comment.
The majority decision by Judges Cheryl Ann Krause and Cindy K. Chung was “premised on the assumption that bearing arms for self-defense is a public nuisance rather than a constitutional right,” the attorneys argued.
The ruling allows states to violate people’s right to bear arms in public for self-defense by banning guns at parks, beaches, playgrounds, zoos, casinos, public transit, healthcare facilities, public film sets, youth sports events, public libraries and museums, concert arenas and other entertainment facilities, bars and restaurants that serve alcohol, and other public gathering places, they wrote.
“The panel’s decision rubber-stamping New Jersey’s effort to deem nearly everything a ‘sensitive place’ renders Bruen a dead letter,” they wrote.
They added: “The issues at stake are far too important to let that decision be the last word on the constitutionality of New Jersey’s outlier regime.”
Beyond the ban on guns in sensitive places, the gun owners’ attorneys also disputed the constitutionality of the law’s requirement — which Krause and Chung let stand — that carry applicants get four “reputable,” non-family people to vouch for them.
“Bruen was emphatic: ‘[G]ranting licensing officials discretion to deny licenses based on a perceived lack of need or suitability’ violates the Second Amendment,” the attorneys wrote.
If the full court agrees to rehear the case, both sides will present their arguments in Philadelphia to a cadre of 23 appellate judges, 13 of whom were appointed by Republican presidents and 10, by Democratic presidents.
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