BrownDuck wrote:
Actually, I was curious myself so I looked it up:
http://www.handgunlaw.us/states/newjersey.pdf wrote:
New Jersey prohibits the manufacture, transport, shipment, sale or disposal of large capacity ammunition magazines, unless the magazine is intended to be used for authorized military or law enforcement purposes. N.J. Rev. Stat § 2C:39-9h. New Jersey law defines “large capacity ammunition magazine†as a box, drum, tube or other container which is capable of holding more than 15 rounds of ammunition to be fed continuously and directly into a semi-automatic firearm. Section 2C:39-1y
What they don't say in the article is exactly how "large capacity" this man's clips were. For example, he may have had a Glock with a capacity of 17 rounds. Doing so would clearly violate the law, but IMO, not justify the sentence handed down.
Yeah. Unfortunately, many of the laws banning "large capacity magazines" are specifically designed to ban the most commonly used gun types (and not necessarily the cheap ones commonly used on the street either). Most 9mm pistols hold 16 rounds in the magazine and one in the chamber. Makes the "more than 15" seems pretty obviously designed to make it impossible to own a "normal" 9mm. You'd have to actually get special short magazines in order to comply with the law.
I suppose it's possible that he was carrying around a 50 round drum or 30 round stick add on to his pistols, but I think it's overwhelmingly more likely that this was at best a technicality. Add to that the charge for the hollow points, which are legal if "on your property", which in this case packed in with other moving stuff (whether he'd completed the move or not) would qualify. Heck. Your car is your property. Assuming the gun itself was properly locked and ammunition kept separate, he should not have been in violation of the law. At least the bit that was quoted makes it appear that the purpose is to say that you can't wander around with a weapon loaded with hollow points. His weapon wasn't loaded.
Heck. How does one buy those hollow points anyway? It clearly isn't illegal to have them, or even to have them in a box in your car. I just really think this is a case of taking the literal words of the law to the most ridiculous extreme and applying no common sense at all.