Making Money Off New Jersey’s Law Breaking Gun Buy-Backs

Opinion

New Jersey – -(AmmoLand.com)- How would it sound to you to get paid by the State of New Jersey to break the law? Well, if that is appealing to you then standby because you’re not going to want to miss this.

It’s no secret that New Jersey has conceivably the worst gun laws in the country. In the Garden State, subjects can only possess firearms legally under two circumstances according to the statute.

1. If you want to possess (or purchase) a shotgun or rifle (long gun) you must have a valid firearm owner’s identification card.
2. If you want to possess a handgun/pistol [in places beyond the states listed exemptions] you must have a valid permit to carry.

Those are the circumstances of firearm possession in New Jersey not covered by the exemption.

To obtain a firearm owner’s identification card (FID) one must go through an application process, background check, proof of employment must be supplied, fingerprinting, mental health background check, paying off numerous fees, and having two people not related to the applicant vouch for them. Getting an FID is a pain but if you don’t have any disqualifiers, you’re usually granted one. Yes, there are plenty of hellacious exceptions to this and there are plenty of local jurisdictions that do not respect this fundamental right, but for the most part, getting an FID is straightforward in New Jersey.

To obtain a permit to carry, the ordinary peasants in the Garden State cannot get those. Unless you’re politically connected or in some sort of security-related field, you’re more than likely not going to obtain a permit to carry. New Jersey is one of the final holdout states that just does not think ordinary citizens are entitled to their enumerated, god-given, birthright to both keep and BEAR arms.

Every other scenario concerning the possession and transactions of firearms in the state of New Jersey is through a narrow group of exemptions. This is where you, a citizen, are being invited by the state to break the law and get paid!

You read that correctly, the New Jersey office of Attorney General is asking citizens to break the law, risking receiving felony convictions, by taking part in a so-called gun buyback program! But before we go over that, let’s discuss those possession exemptions to make sure we’re not missing anything.

Without either of the documents, a person may possess a firearm in their home, place of business that they own, at a range, and at a gunsmith’s shop. People may also transport their firearm directly from their home, to the range, or their place of business, etc., without any unnecessary deviations, and then directly back. To repeat, you can not drive or transport your firearms to any other place inside of NJ that is not one of these few listed exemptions.

Enter the New Jersey Attorney General’s office, the Chief Law Enforcement Agency for the entire state of New Jersey.

The AG’s website recently posted online the following:

GUN BUY BACK – CASH FOR GUNS EVENTS
NJ residents can anonymously turn in up to 3 guns. NO questions asked!
Saturday, August 7 10AM – 4PM

Atlantic City, East Orange, Newark and Paterson

Up to $250 per weapon!

The release continues:

In partnership with Passaic County Prosecutor Camelia Valdes, Acting Essex County Prosecutor Theodore Stephens II, and Acting Atlantic County Prosecutor Cary Shill, Acting Attorney General Bruck announced that the state- and locally-sponsored “Guns for Cash” events will be held on Saturday, August 7 in locations in Passaic, Essex, and Atlantic counties.

Residents can turn in firearms with “no questions asked,” and receive as much as $250 per weapon. Police officers will be stationed at each buyback location to collect and secure the guns. The gun buyback initiative is funded with forfeiture dollars obtained by the local police departments and County Prosecutors’ Offices, as well as forfeiture funds from the Division of Criminal Justice.

Where are these gun “buy backs”, more appropriately called by Cam Edwards “compensated confiscations” occurring?

• East Orange
  New Vision Baptist Church
  100 Warrington Place
• Newark
  Prudential Center
  25 Lafayette Street
• Paterson
  St. Luke’s Baptist Church
  139 Carroll Street (A.M. Tyler Place)
• Atlantic City
  Atlantic City Fire Station No. 1
  John R. Jasper Jr. Memorial Fire Station
  900 Atlantic Avenue
• Paterson
  Gilmore Memorial Tabernacle
  68 Bishop Clarence Gilmore Blvd

There are a couple of things that your attention needs to be drawn to.

First, none of the locations listed are one of the places people are allowed to legally possess firearms within the state exemptions. Want to hand in a handgun for the whopping $250.00 bribe? Well, if you don’t have a permit to carry, you’d be breaking the law. Have an old rifle in the closet from granddad and want to be rid of it? If you don’t have an FID card, don’t even think about transporting your firearm to one of those locations. The AG’s office touts these as “safe locations“, but nowhere in New Jersey’s laws is there a vehicle to host one of these law-breaking buy-back events.

What assurances are people offered if they’re stopped on their way to one of these locations to dispose of a firearm? There are none. But hey, the AG says it’s okay to break the law.

Second, not that I advocate for this, but let’s be real here, the AG is making it super easy for criminals to dispose of evidence. Are you a criminal that is in possession of a defaced firearm or one that you discharged during a crime, like maybe a murder? Well, the AG will take that firearm from you “no questions asked”.

If you’re tired of throwing your murder weapons in the river, use this opportunity to make some money while ridding yourself of potentially harmful evidence to be in possession of.

And finally, third, there is money to be made here folks! Are you a collector? Do you have a LOT of guns? Do you have some old junk guns? Well now is your time to shine! Bring your junky old wall hangers to one of these compensated confiscation programs and get paid good money for them! Something you picked up years ago for fifty bucks could now be worth five times that! Talk about a good return on your investment. Or better yet, seek out some junk guns to buy on the cheap and offload them at one of these locations. This is a win-win for someone that wants to turn their old junk guns into cash to buy a newer and more modern well-functioning firearm. With the prices of ammunition today, $250.00 will help buy a good amount of rounds to feed through your firearms! And the state is begging you to break their law in the process.

Just remember person-to-person firearms sales are illegal in New Jersey without a state background check!

Don’t think this is a worthy endeavor? Take a look at these circumstances where it was a win for “buy-back” customers:

YouTuber Royal Nonesuch made a quick $300 by taking 3 firearms that he’d built out of scrap and selling them back to the state of Missouri. He described two of the pipe guns as:

“The ‘crappiest guns I’ve ever made’”.

But he was still able to successfully sell them off to the program.

or

A gun rights group plans to use its profits from a Chicago Police “gun buyback” event to send children aged 10 to 16 to a shooting camp hosted by the National Rifle Association.

The group, Guns Save Life, brought home “thousands of dollars to use” for the camp after trading in guns at the June 2 event at New Life Covenant Church in Grand Crossing, said John Boch, the executive director of Guns Save Life. Boch, of Downstate Bloomington, was able to trade in two guns for $100 each, and he said other group members who went to the buyback were also able to trade in guns for money.

…

The guns Boch turns in at the events are “mostly scrap,” he said: They’re usually old and unusable, but even the newer ones that the Guns Save Life members turned in were all “broken down, all non-firing, missing parts and pieces.” Some appeared to have been through fires or rusted beyond use, he said.

or

A woman in Baltimore is using the city’s gun buyback program, not to get firearms off the street but to upgrade to a better weapon.

On Monday, the city’s Police Department paid gun owners anywhere from $25 to $500 for their unwanted firearms and magazines in an attempt to get weapons off the street, FOX 45 News reported.

…

While some residents turned in firearms that went unused for years, a woman who went by the name Darlene told the station she was turning in her 9 mm so she could “upgrade to a better weapon.”

“I don’t know [what type of weapon],” she said. “I haven’t quite decided.”

These are a few of the many stories of people profiting over such absurd events as a gun “buy back”. Now, if you’re one of the people out there that legitimately wants to get rid of a firearm you have for some money, you’re best off reaching out to a federally licensed firearm dealer. Talk to them, find out the value of what you have, and try to sell it through or to them. There have been so many instances of rare and valuable firearms being traded into some of these events that people would be willing to pay real good money for. If you’re afraid that the firearm would then be “out on the street” for illegal use, rest assured many collectors looking to pick up war relics and rare firearms are not going to be out running amuck with a priceless firearm.

I reached out to New Jersey gun lawyer, Second Amendment advocate, and author of several books Evan Nappen about this absurd program for his perspective. This is what he had to tell me about compensated confiscations:

“It’s the feel good, no impact on crime, fool the public, no questions asked, destruction of evidence, crime gun disposal program. These so-called ‘Buybacks’ lure the unsuspecting to transport and possess their guns outside of any statutory exemption. All this, while the State vigorously enforces its gun laws on honest citizens for any infraction, no matter how trivial.”

The fact of the matter is gun “buy backs” are feel-good “look we’re doing something” failures. They do nothing to increase the public safety of the neighborhoods they purport to serve. In fact, a study recently noted that there is an acute increase in crime in areas that recently had firearm buy backs. Why? Because the bad guys know that there are fewer guns in the area.

Over the last decade, over 100 U.S. cities have adopted GBPs with the hope of reducing gun crime. Using data from the 1991-2015 National Incident–Based Reporting System (NIBRS) and National Vital Statistics System (NVSS), this study is the first to comprehensively assess the impact of city GBPs on gun crime and firearm-related violence.

Our findings provide no evidence that GBPs are effective at deterring gun crime, firearm related homicides, or firearm-related suicides in the short- or long-run.

…

Moreover, we find some evidence of a small, short-run increase in gun crime in the two months following a GBP. This result is consistent with the notion that GBPs primarily target low-risk firearms that are more likely to deter crime than be used in the commission of a crime (Kuhn et al. 2002) and with the hypothesis that some criminals may be emboldened by their perception that victims will be less likely to defend themselves with deadly physical force (Lott 1998).

So there you have it, you can profit off of New Jersey’s illegal and sad excuse of a public safety event.

If you get caught with a gun heading to one of these “safe locations”, just tell the cops “The AG told me to do it.” Send us an email from jail, we’d love to hear about your experiences, and maybe we’ll help find an attorney to start a go-fund-me for you. If you succeed in offloading some old junk guns and buy something neat and new with the money, snap some selfies and be sure to thank and tag Governor Murphy and the NJ Attorney General in your social media posts.

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John Petrolino is a US Merchant Marine Officer, writer, author of Decoding Firearms: An Easy to Read Guide on General Gun Safety & Use and NRA certified pistol, rifle, and shotgun instructor living under and working to change New Jersey’s draconian and unconstitutional gun laws. You can find him on the web at www.johnpetrolino.com on twitter at @johnpetrolino and on instagram @jpetrolinoiii .