New Jersey Caps You at One Handgun a Month. Two Lawsuits Just Asked a Federal Judge to End the Law for Good.
Every plaintiff challenging New Jersey’s handgun-rationing law moved for summary judgment September 14, and the state must now defend a one-a-month limit whose historical record starts in 1975.
The New Jersey one-gun-a-month law tells a buyer the state has already fingerprinted, background-checked, and licensed that they may take home exactly one handgun every 30 days. On September 14, every plaintiff suing over that law asked a federal judge to strike it down and permanently block its enforcement, no trial required.
Two motions for summary judgment landed the same day in the consolidated cases before Judge Karen M. Williams in Camden. One came from Matthew Struck, Daniel Francisco, the Firearms Policy Coalition, and the National Rifle Association. The other came from Christian Benton, the Coalition of New Jersey Firearm Owners, and Gun Owners Foundation.
When both plaintiff groups in a consolidated case move for final judgment on the same morning, that’s not a scheduling accident. It’s a statement that they think the record is complete and the law can’t survive it.
The law on the table: N.J.S.A. 2C:58-3(i), added in 2009, limits buyers to one handgun in any 30-day period, with narrow exemptions. It applies to handguns only; New Jersey sets no monthly quota on rifles or shotguns. And it sits on top of a permit system that already requires a separate, police-issued purchase permit for every single handgun, each preceded by a background investigation.
Read that stack in order, because the order is the argument. By the time the 30-day clock touches anyone, the state has already decided the buyer may lawfully own handguns. The ration doesn’t screen anybody. It makes people the state already cleared wait.
What was filed: the motions ask for summary judgment (a final ruling that the law is unconstitutional on the undisputed facts, no trial needed) and a permanent injunction against enforcement. The lead brief runs 23 pages and is noticed for the court’s December 15, 2026 motion day, which puts New Jersey’s opposition brief on the clock right now. If Judge Williams grants the motion, the statute doesn’t get narrowed or paused. It’s over.
The historical problem: under the Supreme Court’s Bruen framework, once the Second Amendment’s text covers the conduct, the burden flips to the state to prove its restriction fits the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation. The plaintiffs’ brief walks through what that tradition holds on purchase rationing: nothing. According to the motion, the first one-gun-a-month law in American history arrived in 1975, only five states have ever enacted one, and just three still have one on the books: New Jersey, Maryland, and Virginia.
A rule invented in 1975 is not evidence of what the founding generation understood the right to protect. That is the whole case. And per FPC, the brief notes New Jersey’s own experts acknowledge that laws like this one “did not exist early in the country’s history,” leaving the state to argue from what the motion calls a “hodgepodge” of old rules on gunpowder storage, firearm taxes, and licensing that neither burdened the same conduct nor served the same purpose.
The California problem: New Jersey also has to argue around a fresh loss on a nearly identical law. In Nguyen v. Bonta, the Ninth Circuit affirmed summary judgment against California’s one-gun-a-month statute in June 2025, holding it facially unconstitutional because the Second Amendment protects owning multiple firearms and protects against meaningful constraints on acquiring them. That ruling is final. California’s ration is gone, and the same motion New Jersey now faces is the one California just lost.
FPC president Brandon Combs drew the line in the group’s announcement: “The government has no constitutional authority to ration the People’s rights and politicians do not get to decide how many protected arms peaceable people may acquire in a month.”
The court upstairs: whatever Judge Williams decides, the appeal lands at the Third Circuit. That’s the court that sat en banc on July 17 and, by a 10 to 5 vote in Cheeseman v. Davenport, struck down New Jersey’s ban on so-called “assault firearms” along with its magazine capacity limit. Same state, same Attorney General’s office, same constitutional test, and the state lost on laws it defended far harder than this one. The motions also invoke two June rulings from the Supreme Court, Wolford v. Lopez and United States v. Hemani, both of which kept the burden on governments to justify modern restrictions with real history.
CZ P-10 C (9mm, 15+1)
The compact 9mm plenty of buyers grab as handgun number two: 15+1 capacity, a clean striker trigger, and street prices around $400. In New Jersey it also means a second permit and its own month on the calendar.
Who this hits: the New Jersey buyer who picks up a carry pistol this month and wants a .22 trainer to practice with. Two permits, two background checks, and a state-mandated month in between. If purchase one is a carry gun like the Glock 43X we tested, the practice gun waits until October. Dealers absorb it too: every second sale in a month is a sale the state forbids them to make.
The obvious objection: isn’t this how you stop straw buyers from stocking up and reselling? The theory deserves a straight answer, so here it is. New Jersey doesn’t sell handguns to anonymous walk-ins; every purchase already runs through an individually issued permit and a background investigation, so the only people the ration slows are the ones the state has personally cleared. A straw purchaser committing a felony on the transfer paperwork isn’t deterred by having to space the felonies 30 days apart. And under Bruen, the policy debate isn’t even the test anymore. History is, and 45 states never found this law in theirs.
The takeaway: New Jersey is defending a 2009 policy under a standard that demands founding-era evidence, in front of a district judge whose reviewing court spent July dismantling the state’s flagship gun laws. On this record, the smart money says the ration falls; the open questions are when, and whether the state appeals into a Third Circuit that has already shown its cards. Watch for the state’s opposition brief in the coming weeks, the December 15 motion day, and the Supreme Court’s December 2 argument in Viramontes v. Cook County, the rifle-ban case that could reshape all of it.
Think New Jersey’s one-gun-a-month law survives summary judgment? Tell us in the comments.
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Sources: FPC announcement • Plaintiffs’ summary judgment brief (PDF) • Benton v. Platkin docket (CourtListener) • N.J.S.A. 2C:58-3 • Nguyen v. Bonta, Ninth Circuit opinion (PDF) • Cheeseman v. Davenport, Third Circuit en banc opinion (PDF) • Viramontes v. Cook County, Supreme Court docket. Courtroom photo: Carol M. Highsmith, Library of Congress, public domain.
Justin Trump is the managing editor and owner of CAT Outdoors. The son of a Vietnam veteran, he’s a Certified Glock Armorer, an avid gun enthusiast and 2A advocate. He holds two firearm patents for the CAT M4 and Talon tools. When not managing CAT Outdoors, he enjoys spending time with his family and friends, rooting for Michigan sports teams, and serving his church.