New Jersey’s Second Amendment Catch-22

Among the many Second Amendment-related lawsuits that are percolating around the country is one known as Bergmann-Schoch v. Davenport, which challenges New Jersey’s prohibition on hollow-point ammunition. Besides the named plaintiff, the Coalition of New Jersey Firearm Owners, Gun Owners of America, and Gun Owners Foundation are suing the state over the hollow-point ban, and the plaintiffs attorneys recently submitted their reply to New Jersey’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit.

The entire brief is a joy to read, but the Firearms Policy Coalition highlighted one particularly important part of the response that beautifully rebuts the Catch-22 situation New Jersey deployed in defense of the ban. 

The plaintiffs responded to New Jersey today, saying that the state’s arguments “range from the flatly incorrect, to self-contradictory, to histrionic.”

“Ironically, the military’s bullet of choice – the full metal jacket – is the only alternative New Jersey allows. Defendants… https://t.co/RfGafU50WR pic.twitter.com/j2trUopEkJ

— Firearms Policy Coalition (@gunpolicy) May 7, 2026

The plaintiffs responded to New Jersey today, saying that the state’s arguments “range from the flatly incorrect, to self-contradictory, to histrionic.”

“Ironically, the military’s bullet of choice – the full metal jacket – is the only alternative New Jersey allows. Defendants thus simultaneously demand Plaintiffs use the military round, while claiming Plaintiffs have no right to use military arms.” 

Boy, that’s a headscratcher, isn’t it? Miltary arms aren’t protected by the Second Amendment, but only those arms commonly used by the military are available for New Jersey residents? 

It’s a dumb argument, but then, New Jersey’s ban on hollow-points is just plain stupid too. The Garden State is the most densely-populated state in the nation. If there’s any place where hollow-points should be the standard to help prevent overpenetration and rounds going through apartment walls and into someone else’s residence, it would be New Jersey. 

Instead, the state has made it illegal to possess the safest and most useful rounds for self-defense, and now it’s trying to defend that ban by claiming that hollow-points were developed for military use, even while admitting that they’re rarely used by the military today. 

The entire brief by Steven J. Harfenist and Stephen D. Stamboulieh is well worth reading, because the attorneys clearly delight in tearing apart the arguments by New Jersey Attorney General Jennifer Davenport and her team. Take this passage in response to New Jersey’s claim that ammunition restrictions “evolved over time” because, when “enclosed metallic cartridges began to circulate in society around the 1870s,” there were at least four states that banned them for use in pistols. 

Take Defendants’ selectively quoted 1881 Arkansas law, for example. Buried within the statutory text that [state’s witness Robert] Spitzer replaced with an ellipsis, one finds an exception for pistols “such as are used in the army or navy of the United States, and known as the navy pistol….” Not only does this exception mean the law provides no support for Defendants’ proposition, but it also reveals something far more troubling. “Army and Navy” pistol laws were thinly veiled attempts by “white supremacist legislature[s]” to prevent newly freed slaves from owning firearms after the Civil War.31 Indeed, “ex-Confederate soldiers already had their high-quality Army and Navy guns. But cash-poor freedmen could barely afford lower-cost, simpler firearms not of the Army and Navy quality.”

Whoops! 

It goes without saying that racist gun control laws are invalid analogues, because a historical analogue must “regulate[] arms-bearing for a permissible reason.” And as several Justices recently made clear during oral argument in Wolford v. Lopez, racist and discriminatory laws are as far from having a “permissible reason” as it gets. Indeed, Justice Kavanaugh explained that “we flatly reject… historical example[s]” that “were rooted in racial prejudice.” Such history is “in admissible to … somehow justify an exception to the constitutional right.”

Seriously, I can’t remember the last time I read a legal brief that was so downright gleeful in rebutting virtually every execrable argument advanced to diminish our Second Amendment rights. Pour yourself a beverage of your choice, pop some popcorn, settle in your favorite comfy chair to enjoy the thoroughly entertaining smackdown delivered by Harfenist and Stamboulieh.

Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.

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