Quote:
"So the State of New Jersey may (in the future) face an interesting dillema if its gun laws are challenged. "
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A short intro, in 1966 the Sills Act was signed into law in NJ. Yes that is correct 1966, two years before the 1968 National Gun Control Act!
The Sills Act basically mandated a permit system that required a (firearms owner ID card) 'permit' be obtained from the police before one could purchase a firearm. The FID (Firearms ID) Card was needed to buy rifles, BB Guns, black powder rifles. But a separate purchase permit for each pistol including BB gun pistols and black powder pistols.
In 1968 New Jersey's gun control act was challenged in court in the case "Burton vs. Sills" and (the 1966 Sills Act) was allowed to stand ..in essence "for the public good" (the judges ruled) . Even though many here would argue that the 1966 law is a blatant violation of the second amendment, it was allowed to stand.
I think part of the reason why the law was allowed to stand might date back yet even further to 1947 when New Jersey had a Constitutional Convention and left out the second amendment.
I have been studying the NJ gun law for a awhile, trying to understand how it got passed in the first place... I have been looking for exact wording of the proposed law as it was written up in 1965, opposition to the law, who voted for the law ,the actual law in 1966 and the only thing I have found is the 1968 Burton vs. Sills challenging the act unsuccessfully. It seems like there is huge gap in information for such an important subject.
From the few sources from comments from some other gun forums ...people who remember how it was before the 1966 law. New Jersey was like any other state in the U.S. when it came to gun laws, with the exception of conceal carry law where a permit was needed for that which dated back to 1924.
From what I was able to gather, open carry in some areas was tolerated. There were no restrictions on buying rifles or pistols except maybe a age restriction. NJ was like other states at the time, until the 1966 law came into being.
I think it is important to study how and why this happened and to make sure that another 1966 Sills Act does not happen again in other states. At the time, as much as I can gather, the only real well publicized gun control act to date was the Sullivan Law in New York State which went into effect in 1911.
I believe the other States like Massachusetts, Illinois, Hawaii and their permit to purchase schemes came after New Jersey's in 1966. One source I looked at said Illinois based their FOID (Firearms Owners ID) system on New Jersey's FID (Firearms ID) scheme.