(TRENTON) - New Jersey Assembly Majority Leader Lou Greenwald
(D-Camden/Burlington) had the following published Wednesday in The
Star-Ledger as the Assembly plans Thursday to vote on more than 20 gun
violence prevention bills:
“As
President Obama remarked in last week’s State of the Union address, ‘It has been
two months since Newtown. I know this is not the first time this country has
debated how to reduce gun violence. But this time is different. Overwhelming
majorities of Americans — Americans who believe in the Second Amendment — have
come together around common-sense reform.’
As a
father, my heart breaks for the families who lost loved ones that tragic
December day at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn. Twenty beautiful 6- and
7-year-olds were senselessly taken from this world, along with six courageous
educators who sacrificed themselves in the protection of their
students.
We know of
the mass tragedies in Newtown and Aurora, in Tucson and in Blacksburg. We also
recognize that gun violence takes the life of a New Jerseyan almost every day;
in 2011, 269 New Jerseyans were killed by guns — a 9 percent increase from the
previous year. We must take notice when the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention project that gun deaths are expected to exceed motor vehicle
fatalities for the first time by 2015.
Whether it
is a movie theater in Colorado, a college campus in Virginia or a street corner
in New Jersey, enough is enough.
This is
why the New Jersey General Assembly is advancing a comprehensive package of
common-sense bills to prevent gun violence. In addition to combating illegal gun
trafficking by criminals, the legislation seeks to ban high-capacity magazines
and armor-piercing bullets, address New Jersey’s mental health crisis, improve
school safety and begin a tough conversation about a culture that too often
glorifies senseless violence.
Some have
suggested that these common-sense measures are an attack on the Second
Amendment. This is simply not true. The Second Amendment is a fundamental
freedom that protects the individual right of citizens to bear arms for lawful
purposes. Yet, just like the freedom of speech — which does not protect slander
or false shouts of “Fire!” in a crowded theater — this right has its
limitations.
In its
2008 ruling in District of Columbia vs. Heller, the U.S. Supreme Court held:
“Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited.
... Nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on … laws imposing
conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.” This opinion, it
should be noted, was delivered by Justice Antonin Scalia — widely viewed to be
the court’s most conservative member.
Our
comprehensive package of bills balances reasonable proposals to prevent gun
violence in New Jersey while respecting the Second Amendment rights of
law-abiding citizens. The legislation strikes a balance between the right to
bear arms and our public safety imperative to close dangerous gaps in our
existing gun laws.
In New
Jersey today, individuals on the terrorist watch list can still purchase
firearms. Massive purchases of ammunition over the internet — the method used by
the Aurora movie theater shooter to easily amass an arsenal of more than 6,000
bullets — are permitted without a face-to-face transaction. Gaps exist in the
mental health background check system — the type of issue that enabled the
Virginia Tech shooter to purchase weapons with which he then murdered 32 people
and wounded 17 others.
Closing
these gaps should not be an issue of ideology or political partisanship, for
surely we can agree that more needs to be done to protect our children and our
schools. Surely we can agree that people on the terrorist watch list should not
have access to firearms. Surely we can agree that stronger mental health
background checks are needed, and that taxpayer dollars should not be invested
in companies that sell military-style assault weapons to civilians. And surely
we can agree that gun owners’ personal information should not be released to the
public.
We can and
we must do better. Our children, our families and our communities deserve
it.”
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