What happened in Jersey City earlier this week was troubling, to say the least. An anti-Semitic attack that leaves four innocent people dead, one a police officer, is not something anyone should be ready to dismiss any time soon. We have a problem if we’re a country where an attack like this not only happens, but doesn’t grab hold of the headlines for weeks or months.
Funny how El Paso did and Jersey City hasn’t, isn’t it?
Anyway, make no mistake though, anti-gunners in New Jersey are ready to pounce on this incident like nobody’s business. In fact, Governor Phil Murphy has already made his opening salvos.
Gov. Phil Murphy, in a televised appearance Wednesday night, said there’s little chance the guns used in a Jersey City massacre that left several people dead this week came from New Jersey.
And while boasting that New Jersey has some of the strongest gun laws in the nation, Murphy told News 12’s Eric Landskroner without federal support, those regulations are “not enough.”
“I don’t know the facts, but the chances are 4 out of 5, those guns didn’t come from New Jersey,” Murphy said on the news station’s edition of Ask the Governor, a series that had been a longstanding presence on New Jersey 101.5 but that the Murphy administration has since taken to other networks.
In fairness, Murphy is probably right. There’s at least an 80 percent chance those guns came from outside of New Jersey. I’d argue the chance is even higher, to be honest.
I also know, however, that it doesn’t really matter.
You see, as I’ve noted before, guns are going to end up where there is a demand for them. They’re like water, always seeking out the “low spots,” or places where there’s a demand for guns in the criminal world. These two shooters were most definitely criminals so, of course, they were going to get guns. There wasn’t really ever any way to have stopped it from happening.
Well, there’s one way it could have been stopped, but Murphy and the anti-gun crusaders in his state won’t like it.
New Jersey is one of the toughest states in the nation in which to get a concealed carry permit. It’s a “May Issue” state where those applying must present a cause as to why such a permit should be issued. Generic causes like “self-defense” don’t hold much water. You need a specific reason why you feel you should be allowed to carry a gun.
As a result, absolutely no one on the scene in the early stages of Jersey City were armed.
Now, we don’t know for certain that any of them would have wanted to be armed, but we do know that state law made it so none of them ever really had the choice. That decision was taken out of their hands by the state, a state that is now trying to use their draconian measures that failed these four people as leverage on the rest of the nation.
I’m sorry, but that’s not going to happen. New Jersey, like most other anti-gun states, continue to try and blame their problems on all the other states in the union. The problem is that those states rarely have the same issues. Chicago wants to blame Indiana for their high crime rate, yet if guns alone were the issue, Indiana would have a similar crime rate to Chicago. It doesn’t.
On the same token, we’ve seen time and time again that states with more lenient concealed carry laws don’t have a corresponding increase in crime, something that the “more gun equals more crime” crowd have yet to actually explain.
The truth is that criminals will get guns and even worse, regardless of how strict your gun laws actually are. The best thing an individual state can do is to empower their citizens to protect themselves. That means “Shall Issue” concealed carry laws at a minimum, though constitutional carry is ideal.
Sure, there may be a four out of five chance that those guns came from out of state, but there’s a 99 out of 100 chance that New Jersey’s gun control laws made it so there was no outcome possible where the only people killed were the two shooters.
