“Political Grief,” Gun Control, and Guilt by Association

Across the country, voters disappointed with President Trump’s election are coping with their feelings in various ways.

Eight years ago, Hillary Clinton supporters comforted themselves through “alternative reality” websites based on the fantasy of Hillary prevailing in the 2016 race (here and here, for instance).

One of these, HillaryBeatTrump.org, included imaginings about the terrible fate awaiting the NRA in this alternative universe. A fake news item at the site writes how “President Hillary Rodham Clinton gave a fiery, furious, brilliant speech excoriating the National Rifle Association as ‘America’s leading terrorist organization,’ calling the group ‘a sociopathic group of pro-gun, pro-murder, male extremists whose ongoing support for violence poses the single biggest domestic threat to our national security,’” with fake-President Clinton “instructing law enforcement agencies to shut down the NRA, ‘as a terrorist organization that’s responsible for killing more Americans than Al Qaeda, Ebola, and heroin combined.’”

Now, according to Rolling Stone magazine, the most recent election has rekindled similar “fears and hurt and memories of what was previously,” with Harris voters struggling to process their candidate’s loss along with a “loss of identity, loss of agency, and loss of voice” that accompany the feelings of “political grief.” “Experiencing grief and disappointment doesn’t make you powerless,” say the consultants quoted by the magazine, who encourage sufferers to “find ways to take that power back, to be an agent of change in your community.”

Rather than volunteering at the food bank or donating to local unhoused populations, as the article recommends, for many the reaction to the new presidency is manifesting itself as a commitment to impede the democratically elected president and his allies, often under the paradoxical guise of “protecting democracy.” This, predictably, includes stepped-up efforts to enact extreme gun control measures. 

In New Jersey, Assemblywoman Carol A. Murphy, a Democrat and “proud… Moms Demand Action Gun Sense Candidate,” has apparently decided that the state’s already draconian gun laws don’t make it hard enough for law-abiding individuals to acquire firearms.

On January 16, Murphy introduced a bill to amend the state’s handgun “permit to purchase” and “firearms purchaser identification card” laws to add new requirements. 

The current version of the law, N.J.S.2C:58-3, generally states that anyone who is not a licensed dealer must have a valid “firearms purchaser identification card” (FPIC) to “acquire an antique cannon or a rifle or shotgun,” including BB, pellet, and black powder rifles. Another subsection prohibits a person from acquiring a handgun without a valid state-issued “permit to purchase a handgun” (PPH), and conversely, prohibits selling, giving, transferring, assigning, or otherwise disposing of a handgun without the other party to the transaction possessing such permit, unless the “purchaser, assignee, donee, receiver or holder” is licensed as a firearms dealer. The PPH only applies to a single transaction, so each handgun requires a separate permit, and state law prohibits more than one delivery of a handgun to any person within a 30-day period. Further, any transaction requiring either a PPH or an FPIC must be brokered through a retail gun dealer, who must record the details of the transaction, conduct state and federal background checks, and may charge a fee of up to $70.

PPHs and FPICs are only issued by the police after an applicant satisfies the many requirements – fingerprinting, training, names and addresses of “two reputable citizens personally acquainted” with the applicant as references, a medical privacy waiver, payment of the applicable fees, and being found not to be disqualified under any of the 15 or so categories of “disabilities” listed in the law. One of these is the suspiciously elastic disqualification “where the issuance would not be in the interest of the public health, safety or welfare because the person is found to be lacking the essential character of temperament necessary to be entrusted with a firearm.” Although the law mandates a turnaround time of 30 days for residents, a 2022 court ruling found as a fact that permitting delays occurred in approximately 100 different jurisdictions, some taking more than a year, and that delays “continue to be widespread.”

This permitocracy, it seems, is still not enough. Assemblywoman Murphy’s bill, A5210, proposes adding, as a new condition to qualify for a permit or FPIC, that all of the applicant’s “household members” also provide fingerprints, and pass the background checks and the police investigation that determines whether any of the 15 disqualifying disabilities apply. A “household member,” as defined in the bill, means “any person over the age of 18 who cohabitates with an applicant for a handgun purchase permit or firearms purchaser identification card.”   

There’s no requirement that these household members have actual access to the gun or evince an intention to use the gun; the simple fact that the applicant shares a roof with other adults places these occupants on the same footing as the applicant, as far as the bill is concerned.

Left at a loss as to what this “guilty by association” amendment seeks to accomplish, readers need only go to the bill statement, at the end: “Under the bill, an applicant would be disqualified from obtaining a PPH or FPIC if the applicant resides with a ‘household member’ who is disqualified from owning a firearm.” Essentially, if the elaborate state law doesn’t succeed in preventing a qualified person from being eligible to acquire a gun, the state will attribute, to that person, the criminality, mental health commitments, protective orders and other firearm disabilities of the persons who surround him or her.

This proposal is, to put it mildly, breathtakingly ignorant and an affront to all fair-minded people. Not only is this bill, if passed, certain to fail under the U.S. Supreme Court’s Bruen test, no other constitutional right is made dependent on the status or merit of another individual. Imagine, if you will, stripping a citizen’s right to vote because he or she shares living quarters with legal non-citizens, illegal aliens, or convicted felons who have lost their franchise, or denying the right to freely speak, write and publish one’s sentiments on all subjects, because a person’s “household member” was intemperate enough to have a civil judgment issued against them for defamation or libel.

Even the radical fandom behind the make-believe world of “President Hillary” would have a hard time matching this kind of political lunacy.

Here in the real world, fortunately, the Constitution still applies, even to disappointed lawmakers experiencing political grief.