By Michael Hill
Correspondent
Using their right to free speech to debate their right to own guns at the Guarini Institute of Government and Leadership at St. Peter’s University. An exchange of ideas entitled: “Caught in the Crossfire: The Push for Gun Control and the Second Amendment.”
One lawmaker defended New Jersey’s strict process for a gun carry permit by offering national statistics.
“A dozen cops and 428 civilians have been killed since 2007 alone at the hands of people with concealed carry permits. I think the fact that New Jersey’s law is a bit more stringent in terms of showing the particularized need as to why you need to carry a handgun if you’re not a member of law enforcement has kept the people of this state safer,” said Assemblyman Raj Mukherji.
“Self defense use by armed citizens exceeds 4.7 million times a year. 4.7 times. That’s from the Justice Department. No independent group, no NRA, no Bloomberg Survey. That’s the kind of people that you’re stopping in New Jersey from protecting themselves,” said New Jersey Second Amendment Society President Alexander Roubian.
Moderator and retired Judge Kevin Callahan wondered about the impact of all the mass shootings in America.
“And nothing positively has been coming out of our government to address this situation. Why is that?” he asked.
Former Gov. Jim Florio says change would come if each voter would judge each member of Congress based on whether that representative supports gun control.
“The House of Representatives recently rejected an effort to have background checks. Eighty percent of the people in the country polled say they’d support that. Notwithstanding that, the Congress didn’t respond to their constituency. They responded to the NRA,” Florio said.
“It’s not even an issue and yet we can’t point to too many cases and say if this person had just had the proper background check then this wouldn’t have happened. You can’t predict behavior. There’s no way to predict that somebody’s just going to snap one day,” said Attorney Jeff Henninger.
And, they squared off about the merits of gun buyback programs.
“There’s no detriment to having people come turn in a gun if they want to. As I said the hope is that they turn in a gun that some day would have been used in a crime to hurt somebody, to kill somebody. You’ll never know that story because that gun will never go back out on to the street,” said Hudson County Prosecutor Esther Suarez.
“In my opinion, I’ve had a lot of police chiefs tell me that it doesn’t do anything. What happens in a lot of these cases, which is why I’m very vocal about the buyback, is you have grandma turning in grandpa’s old World War II gun,” Roubian said.
It was a two-hour, gun “give-and-take” that covered a lot of ground with both sides using the First Amendment to debate the Second Amendment and each, at some point, saying to the other, “I don’t understand why you can’t agree with us” on a certain aspect of the issue.