Buy a handgun in New Jersey in January and the state has news for you: you’re done until February. Not because you failed the background check — you passed it. Not because you don’t have the state’s own permit — you’re holding it. Because somebody in Trenton decided a constitutional right comes with a monthly limit, like cell-phone data or shrimp at the buffet.
One handgun per 30 days. Fill every slot on the punch card and you’re allowed twelve a year — try setting up a carry gun, a nightstand gun, and a .22 trainer on that schedule and you’ve burned a whole season waiting on a calendar instead of a background check.
The Motion That Landed Monday
The paperwork hit the docket September 14. The Firearms Policy Coalition — with the NRA, Gun Owners of America, and individual gun owners alongside — filed motions for summary judgment asking a federal court to put the one-gun-a-month law down for good.
“Summary judgment” is lawyer talk, so here’s the gun-counter translation: the facts aren’t in dispute, Your Honor. Nothing to try. Just rule.
The cases are Benton v. Davenport and Struck v. Davenport — two lawsuits stapled together — in front of Judge Karen M. Williams in federal district court in New Jersey. The ask is a two-parter: declare the law unconstitutional, and slap a permanent injunction on it, which means the state doesn’t just lose — it never gets to enforce the thing again.
Now the fine print, because we don’t do false alarms here: a motion filed is not a motion won. The law is still in effect today, and the court’s calendar doesn’t even take the motion up until December 15.
Slow fuse. But it’s lit.
A Ration Book for a Right
The argument itself fits on an index card. The Second Amendment protects your right to keep and bear “Arms.” Plural. And FPC’s motion says there’s no historical tradition — none — of the government rationing how often a law-abiding citizen may buy a handgun.
New Jersey’s law traces back to the founding era of… 1975.
That date is the whole ballgame. Under the Supreme Court’s Bruen decision, a gun law only survives if the state can show Americans regulated guns that way back when the ink on the Constitution was still drying. Trenton has to walk into Judge Williams’ courtroom with a founding-era ration book. The Minutemen were not issued one musket per month.
And notice what the law pretends to accomplish. The guy buying his second handgun of the month already has a handgun. Whatever Trenton thinks it’s preventing walked out of the store thirty days ago — the wait protects nothing but the filing cabinet.
By FPC’s count, only five states ever passed a scheme like this, and just three still have one on the books. That number’s about to get smaller — because of what already happened out West.
Trenton’s California Problem
New Jersey’s real headache isn’t the plaintiffs. It’s the precedent riding with them.
FPC already killed California’s one-gun-a-month law — same scheme, different license plate — in a case called Nguyen v. Bonta. The Ninth Circuit struck it down as unconstitutional, and FPC notes that was the first time that court ever entered final judgment burying a gun law under the Second Amendment.
Sit with that one. The Ninth Circuit. The bench that spent a generation blessing every restriction California could invent looked at gun rationing and couldn’t find a way to save it.
So picture the table in Judge Williams’ courtroom. California ran this exact defense with all the resources of the biggest state in the country, in the friendliest circuit gun control ever had — and lost.
New Jersey now gets to make the same argument, for the same law, under the same test, with its best comparable already in the ground. What’s the play, Trenton — argue the Ninth Circuit has gone soft on guns?
If Williams follows the trail the Ninth Circuit already blazed, the ration book goes through the shredder and “three states left” becomes two. That’s the endgame taking shape — not one dramatic Supreme Court showdown, but rationing dying in courtrooms one state at a time, each ruling citing the last, until the final holdout’s lawyers stand alone explaining why everybody else read the Constitution wrong.
You’ve been told your whole life that Jersey is just like this. Permanent. Baked in.
But the people who wrote this law in 1975 assumed no court would ever make them show their homework. Bruen made them show it. California couldn’t.
And there is no secret file in Trenton where their photocopy of the same homework gets a better grade.
December 15 is on the calendar. Circle it. It’s the one thing New Jersey can’t ration.
