Two nights in New Jersey

Saturday night in Newark, New Jersey:

An off-duty Newark police officer shot and injured a man who carjacked him as the officer was putting air in his tires at a gas station on Route 21 early this morning, the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office said.

The man, later identified as Marcus Brent, 19 and also from Newark, was then found at University Hospital seeking treatment, Chief Assistant Prosecutor Thomas Fennelly said in the release.

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Sunday night in Milburn, New Jersey:

An evening of Christmas shopping turned into a violent nightmare Sunday night when a man returning with his wife to their parked Range Rover at an upscale New Jersey mall was fatally shot in the head and their vehicle carjacked from a parking deck at the Mall at Short Hills.

Police said the two assailants fled in the stolen car and an alert was out for the 2012 silver Range Rover with the license plate U26BVD.

The two stories started out similarly. Two men near their vehicles were approached by thugs with the desire to carjack them.

In the Newark incident, the off-duty cop had a firearm, and was able to draw his weapon and shoot the suspect to defend his life, putting the suspect in the hospital without sustaining injuries of his own.

In the incident in Milburn, a “normal” second-class citizen who could not have easily received a concealed weapons permit under New Jersey’s draconian permitting process, was approached by two men who with no regard for the law. In a feeble effort to defend his life and that of his wife, he found that words were no match for a thug’s bullet, and he died in a mall parking lot (another “gun free zone”).

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One of these men had the legal permission to carry a firearm for his self defense because of his job. New Jersey denied the other man that same permission.

Do all men not have the right to self defense?

In New Jersey, the obvious answer is a resounding “no,” and because of that denial of a human right, another widow weeps.

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