On Thursday, June 19, 2025, colleague Darin Goens, New Jersey state director for the NRA, and I were forced to spend a perfectly good beach day trapped in the N.J. State Capitol Annex. We testified before the Senate Law & Public Safety Committee on a package of seven gun control bills that have been swirling around Trenton since late winter. At times, we sparred with lawmakers on some very fundamental questions of fairness, and the theme that emerged through the day is that Democrats continue to rely heavily on blatantly racist platforms to promote their gun-control agenda.
At one point, Senator Paul Moriarty (D-LD4) tried to push Goens into conceding that the level of violent crime correlates to the level of gun control in a given state. This is a constant talking point for the anti-gun rights crowd. New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin has made this same fallacious argument in numerous press releases, press conferences, and speaking events.
On November 13, 2024, at a Zoom meeting with Moms Demand Action, AG Platkin said,
You compare us to other states, we have the lowest level of gun violence in the country. You are six times more likely to be shot and killed in Mississippi than you are in New Jersey. And the laws that we have in place are a big reason for that. There’s nothing inherent about Mississippi that says people there are more violent [emphasis added]. It’s the way they regulate firearms and the way they enforce the laws that they have on the books.
We all know that this argument is ridiculous. There are states with almost no gun control and no crime (e.g., Maine or Wyoming), and states with very high amounts of gun control and high levels of crime (e.g., Maryland).
Statistics on their own prove almost nothing. Moreover, with Heller and Bruen firmly cemented in American jurisprudence, we can now officially say that no core Constitutional right in the U.S. is subject to interest balancing. The government cannot look at a cost/benefit analysis and make a judgment call as to whether the benefits of individual rights outweigh some perceived social cost. First Amendment rights are not subject to interest balancing. Due process is not subject to interest balancing.
Let’s focus on due process for a moment. Law students will often learn the term “Blackstone’s Ratio.” Sir William Blackstone was a 17th-century English jurist who wrote “Blackstone’s Commentaries,” which is widely regarded as the treatise on understanding English Common Law. Since English Common Law forms the basis of all American law, Blackstone’s Commentaries is probably the single most commonly cited text by the U.S. Supreme Court, that isn’t the U.S. Constitution itself.
Blackstone’s Ratio is enlightening as to this question of interest balancing and establishes a simple principle, put simply: It is better that ten guilty men should go free than one innocent man suffer. That is the lens in which we legally view due process rights (and why the Bill of Rights is written the way that it is). This would be the opposite of interest balancing.
In other words, to preserve liberty, the burden on the state should be so high that the social cost is 10:1!
Statistics simply don’t matter when we are talking about fundamental rights.
Having said that, and to return to AG Platkin’s quote from above, there IS something fundamentally different about Mississippi in comparison to New Jersey.
When ranking U.S. states based on the median household income, New Jersey ranks second in the nation. Mississippi ranks dead last. 50 out of 50. The median household income there is less than half of what it is in New Jersey.
There are plenty of statistical studies on this, but they would only attempt to prove what is inherently logical: that violent crime, indeed all crime, correlates almost exclusively with urban poverty. Turning to this study, while several years old, is fascinating. In it, the authors cite studies that were conducted in the 1940s and the 1920s, and reached the same conclusions. In other words, 100 years of studies on the same question reached the same logical result.
This point is obvious to anyone who grew up in urban centers (myself included) that it nearly begs the question.
In their quest to make hay on a political issue (gun control), folks like Sen. Moriarty and AG Platkin callously dismiss the obvious problems of social conditions in urban centers here in New Jersey and across the country. To preserve their political talking points, they completely dismiss the racially disparate impact caused by the very gun control they are fighting to preserve. (See my essay here on the unfortunately long history of this state flatly ignoring racial disparity in firearms licensing and regulation in the Garden State.)
Thursday’s Senate hearing was no exception. During testimony, I once again raised points about disparity in the way the Graves Act is applied here in New Jersey, disparity in licensing, and the inevitable disparity in hiding core Constitutional rights behind high-cost paywalls. The financial barriers, by design, purposefully price certain populations out of exercising their Constitutional rights.
Lawmakers continue to talk past me or just completely ignore my testimony. I raised those same talking points before the Senate Judiciary Committee in December of 2022 when the Bruen-response bill was being debated. I was quoted in the press then as saying, “Making this process so hard and expensive is a thinly veiled attempt to restrict the rights of the poor, and that has obvious implications in creating a disparate impact on racial and ethnic lines.”
Senate President Nicholas Scutari commented in the same article from 2022 that, “This bill is the best attempt that we’ve been able to come up with to meet that Constitutional requirement but continue to safeguard the public from unnecessary guns out there. I mean, the New Jersey I grew up with, you just did not see guns. [emphasis added]”
I spent most of my formative years living and going to school in Jersey City. In the 1980s and 1990s, I saw guns in New Jersey all the time. Just not in the hands of peaceable people choosing to lawfully exercise their rights. I guess Sen. Scutari grew up in a much more privileged part of the state (though he claims to have grown up ‘poor’ in Linden, so perhaps he just doesn’t care).
In New York City in the early 1990s, over 2,000 people per year were murdered. That rate declined to just several hundred per year by 2019. Gun control played no role in that change at all. What changed? What anyone who grew up in New Jersey over the last forty years observed: Gentrification throughout the New York Metro Area. Kick out all of the poor people, throw up luxury housing all over urban centers, and magically, the crime rates decline. Where those poor people went is, apparently, not a concern to policymakers here. Simply swept under the rug.
The callousness of people like AG Platkin, who are willing to dismiss these issues in pursuit of political talking points, is so extreme, we can just heap them onto the pile of institutional racism he is fighting so hard to preserve. Another privileged elite living in one of the wealthiest communities (Montclair) in one of the wealthiest states in the nation (New Jersey), completely dismissing the problems of structural poverty in places like Mississippi.
So it should be no surprise that all seven of those bills from Thursday were read out favorably to the Senate floor by the Democratic majority on the Law & Public Safety Committee, a good portion of which did more to water down Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights for those accused of the simple possession of a firearm in a state that makes it all but impossible for certain people to lawfully exercise their rights.
