NJ Handgun Rationing Law Under Fire

Firearms Policy Coalition, the NRA, Gun Owners of America and other plaintiffs just asked a federal judge to kill New Jersey's one-handgun-a-month rule outright, arguing the state's own hired historians can't produce a Founding-era law that looks anything like it.

State of play: New Jersey lets a qualified buyer purchase one handgun. Then the clock starts. For 30 days, that same person generally can't buy another — a purchase-rationing scheme sold as a way to choke off straw purchasing and gun trafficking.

The legal question: Under Bruen, gun laws survive only if the government can point to a comparable regulation from the Founding era or Reconstruction. Plaintiffs say New Jersey's rationing rule has no historical twin — no colonial or early-republic law that told a lawful buyer he had to wait a month between purchases of the same type of weapon he already had a right to own.

The intrigue: This isn't plaintiffs cherry-picking a weak defense. The motion leans on New Jersey's own expert witnesses, arguing that even the state's paid historians couldn't identify a genuine analogue when pressed. That's the kind of admission that turns a summary-judgment motion from routine into potentially decisive — if a law's defenders can't find their own historical footing, there's not much left for a judge to weigh at trial.

Summary judgment matters here because it skips the fact-finding fight entirely. Plaintiffs are telling the court there's no dispute worth sending to trial — the history either exists or it doesn't, and they say discovery already answered that question in their favor.

Yes, but: New Jersey will argue that purchase limits address a modern problem — bulk buying feeding trafficking networks — that the Founders never had to legislate against because it didn't exist in the same form. Courts have split on how much that argument should count post-Bruen, and a