New Jersey lets a qualified resident buy one handgun. Then it starts a 30-day clock before that same resident may ordinarily buy another.
Firearms Policy Coalition, the National Rifle Association, Gun Owners of America, and other gun-rights plaintiffs are now asking a federal judge to end that handgun-rationing scheme.
Two groups of plaintiffs filed separate motions for summary judgment September 14 in the consolidated Benton v. Davenport and Struck v. Davenport litigation. Both ask U.S. District Judge Karen M. Williams to declare New Jersey’s restriction unconstitutional and permanently block its enforcement.
These are motions, not a court victory. New Jersey has not yet lost the case. But the filings force the state to confront a basic problem: Its own experts acknowledge that laws resembling one-handgun-a-month rationing did not exist early in American history.
New Jersey’s 30-Day Handgun Limit
New Jersey enacted its one-handgun-per-30-days restriction in 2009. The official chapter law amended N.J.S.A. § 2C:58-3(i) to provide that only one handgun may be purchased or delivered on each permit and that “no more than one handgun shall be purchased within any 30-day period.”
The statute does not impose the same numerical limit on rifles or shotguns.
There are exceptions for law-enforcement agencies and officers purchasing duty guns, federally licensed collectors of curios and relics, firearm businesses, certain returned-handgun exchanges, and transactions for which the state police superintendent approves an exemption. Separate provisions allow exemptions involving inheritance, qualifying handgun collections, and sanctioned competition.
Those exceptions do not give an ordinary New Jersey resident an automatic right to buy a second defensive handgun simply because he wants or needs a different firearm before the state’s calendar expires.
The Benton plaintiffs’ summary-judgment brief also argues that knowingly or recklessly violating New Jersey’s regulatory provisions governing handgun-purchase permits can constitute a fourth-degree crime, punishable by as much as 18 months in prison and a fine of up to $10,000.
New Jersey is not targeting a prohibited person or someone accused of threatening another person. The challenged law applies to citizens whom the state has already determined are legally eligible to acquire a handgun.
Two Cases Now Focused on One Restriction
The consolidated litigation includes two groups of plaintiffs presenting overlapping arguments.
Matthew Struck and Daniel Francisco are joined by FPC and the NRA. According to their statement of undisputed material facts, both men hold New Jersey firearms purchaser identification cards and are not prohibited from acquiring or possessing firearms.
They want to purchase two or more commonly owned handguns from licensed dealers within a 30-day period for lawful purposes. They say they would do so but for New Jersey’s enforcement of the law.
The other plaintiffs are Christian Benton, the Coalition of New Jersey Firearm Owners, Gun Owners of America, and Gun Owners Foundation. Benton says the law has forced him to stagger handgun purchases over several months.
The procedural history requires some care. The Benton plaintiffs originally challenged both the 30-day restriction and New Jersey’s broader permit-to-purchase system. The district court dismissed the permit challenge and the claims against a local licensing official in March 2025 while preserving the one-handgun-a-month claim against the state.
As AmmoLand previously reported, Benton and Struck are part of a larger wave of Second Amendment litigation attacking New Jersey’s gun-control regime. The surviving issue here, however, is specific: whether New Jersey may ration handgun purchases by time after a person has already qualified to buy them.
The Right to Keep Arms Requires the Right to Acquire Them
The Struck plaintiffs’ summary-judgment brief begins with the constitutional text.
The Second Amendment protects the right of the people to keep and bear “Arms”—plural. Struck and Francisco argue that the text contains no numerical limit on how many protected handguns a citizen may acquire or how often he may acquire them.
More fundamentally, a person cannot keep or bear a firearm he is prohibited from obtaining.
That principle has gained substantial support in federal courts. In Rigby v. Jennings, a Delaware federal judge recently held that the Second Amendment’s protection extends to acquiring a firearm, including through lawful self-manufacture. The court permanently blocked Delaware’s bans on possessing and making privately manufactured firearms while leaving other provisions intact.
New Jersey cannot avoid that question by arguing that the plaintiffs already own handguns. Different handguns serve different lawful purposes. A full-size home-defense pistol is not the same firearm as a compact carry gun, hunting revolver, competition pistol, or collectible military handgun.
The government does not satisfy the Second Amendment by deciding that one gun owner already has enough.
The State’s Experts Acknowledge the Historical Gap
Once the Second Amendment’s text covers the proposed conduct, the burden shifts to New Jersey to establish that its restriction is consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.
According to the Struck brief, New Jersey retained historians Brennan Rivas and Robert Spitzer. The plaintiffs say both experts acknowledge the central historical problem: Laws like New Jersey’s handgun-rationing mandate “did not exist early in the country’s history.”
The state’s experts instead discuss historical restrictions involving firearm taxes, gunpowder storage, commercial licensing, dealer records, trade with Native Americans, and prohibitions directed at particular categories of people.
The plaintiffs describe that collection as a “hodgepodge” that fails the Supreme Court’s required comparison.
Gunpowder-storage laws addressed the danger of fires and explosions in densely populated areas. Restrictions on trading arms with Native Americans were directed at supplying potential military adversaries. Dealer licensing and taxation requirements did not prohibit every peaceable citizen from purchasing another handgun for 30 days.
Those regulations did not impose the same burden, and they were not enacted for the same reasons.
The plaintiffs also reject the experts’ contention that modern firearm production, interstate travel, market conditions, and gun trafficking justify a modern solution. Arms trafficking is not new, they argue, and changes in degree do not authorize courts to abandon the historical test.
California Already Lost the Same Argument
The most direct modern precedent is Nguyen v. Bonta, in which the Ninth Circuit struck down California’s former one-firearm-per-30-days law.
The court held that the Second Amendment protects both possessing multiple firearms and acquiring firearms without meaningful constraints. After reviewing California’s proposed analogues—including gunpowder regulations, licensing systems, taxes, dealer records, and Native American trade restrictions—the court concluded that the historical record did not establish even a “historical cousin” for the law.
AmmoLand followed Nguyen through the district court, appellate proceedings, and the Ninth Circuit’s final mandate.
That decision is persuasive rather than binding authority in New Jersey because the Garden State sits in the Third Circuit. California has also since enacted a three-firearms-per-month limit, effective in 2026. What Nguyen eliminated was California’s former one-per-30-days law.
Nevertheless, New Jersey must now explain why substantially the same arguments rejected in Nguyen should produce a different constitutional result.
Third Circuit Precedent Makes New Jersey’s Job Harder
The New Jersey litigation also arrives after the en banc Third Circuit’s decision striking down the state’s bans on covered semiautomatic rifles and magazines holding more than ten rounds.
In that case, the Third Circuit rejected New Jersey’s reliance on gunpowder-storage laws, Bowie-knife regulations, trap-gun restrictions, and other purported analogues that differed from the modern bans in their purpose or operation.
The Struck plaintiffs argue that the same methodology governs here. Under the Supreme Court’s recent decisions in Wolford v. Lopez and United States v. Hemani, historical laws must be representative, sufficiently widespread, and relevantly similar in both how and why they burdened the right.
A pile of unrelated gun laws is not a historical tradition.
The Founding Generation Acquired Pistols in Pairs
The Benton plaintiffs do more than argue that New Jersey lacks supporting history. They contend that the historical record affirmatively contradicts handgun rationing.
Their brief cites militia laws requiring mounted men to provide themselves with a “case” of pistols—a term referring to a pair. It identifies examples from Connecticut, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Rhode Island.
The brief also points to historical advertisements offering pistols in cases and notes that George Washington acquired several pairs of pistols through purchases, gifts, and capture.
These are arguments and historical materials submitted by the plaintiffs, not factual findings the district court has already adopted. But they present New Jersey with an uncomfortable originalist question: How can a state claim a historical tradition of prohibiting multiple-handgun purchases when Americans near the Founding were sometimes expected to acquire and possess pistols in pairs?
What Happens Next
New Jersey will have an opportunity to oppose the motions and defend its experts’ historical analysis. The Struck filing lists December 15, 2026, as the motion date.
The court’s eventual decision could carry consequences beyond the Garden State. The plaintiffs’ briefs state that only New Jersey, Maryland, and Virginia presently retain one-handgun-a-month laws, although California now imposes a separate three-firearms-per-month restriction.
For now, the burden rests where the Supreme Court placed it: on the government.
New Jersey must identify a representative American tradition allowing the state to tell an otherwise lawful citizen that he has already acquired his allotted handgun and must wait until the government’s clock permits him to exercise the right again.
The filings argue that no such tradition exists. Handguns predate the Republic, Americans acquired them in multiples, and monthly purchase rationing did not appear until nearly two centuries after the Second Amendment was ratified.
New Jersey’s law is not an enduring constitutional boundary. It is a modern infringement still searching for a historical excuse.
About Duncan Johnson:
Duncan Johnson is a lifelong firearms enthusiast and unwavering defender of the Second Amendment—where “shall not be infringed” means exactly what it says. A graduate of George Mason University, he enjoys competing in local USPSA and multi-gun competitions whenever he’s not covering the latest in gun rights and firearm policy. Duncan is a regular contributor and editor-in-chief for AmmoLand News and is responsible for AmmoLand’s daily gun-rights reporting and industry coverage.
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