By Dave Workman
Editor-in-Chief
Second Amendment advocacy groups and four private citizens filed a federal lawsuit against New Jersey officials, but the case is not about guns, it is about every other potentially-lethal weapon, including baseball bats, various knives and cutting tools, blackjacks and assorted other items.
The 28-page complaint was filed in U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey. Plaintiffs are the Association of New Jersey Rifle & Pistol Clubs, Knife Rights, Inc., and citizens Wendy Copenhaver, Wayne Viden, Walter Everard, Jr., and Salvatore Marsilla. They are represented by Ridgewood, N.J attorney Daniel Schmutter with Hartman & Winnicki.
Defendants are New Jersey Attorney General Jennifer Davenport and State Police Acting Superintendent Jeanne Hengemuhle, in their official capacities.
According to the New Jersey Monitor, the lawsuit seeks to enjoin the state from enforcing state law which allows bats, hammers, screwdrivers, knives, box cutters, pepper spray, bear spray, even sticks which might be used as weapons to be considered lethal weapons.
The Monitor quoted a spokesman for Davenport’s office stating, “New Jersey’s commonsense restrictions on weapons keep our residents safe.”
New Jersey has some of the most restrictive laws in the country when it comes to firearms and self-defense.
According to the complaint, “New Jersey demands that its citizens be defenseless when they go about their day in public. Defenseless. Until forced to issue Permits to Carry a Handgun by the Bruen decision in 2022, New Jersey banned its citizens from carrying any weapon for self-defense. Still today, New Jerseyans cannot carry any ordinary object for protection against violent crime, not a baseball bat, not a stick, not a knife, not a pair of scissors, not anything. If a person keeps an ordinary baseball bat in her car or if she keeps a small baton (sometimes called a kuboton) on her keychain she can find herself arrested and thrown in prison under New Jersey law.”
Elsewhere, the complaint asserts, “Since 2008, when the Supreme Court announced in Heller that the Second Amendment protects a robust individual right to keep and bear arms, the State of New Jersey has been in continuous panic mode. This is because New Jersey leads the nation in laws that infringe the fundamental right to keep and bear arms, and the State rightly worries that its ability to continue suppressing the fundamental constitutional rights of New Jerseyans is in jeopardy.”
“In addition to being utterly unconscionable,” the lawsuit notes, “precluding law-abiding individuals from possessing arms employing less force than firearms is wholly unconstitutional.”
