New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy broadened one of the nation’s toughest gun laws with a ban on untraceable firearms, including those manufactured on three-dimensional printers.
The bill signing, before an audience of anti-gun activists in Trenton, had been scheduled before a mass shooting Wednesday night at a Thousand Oaks, California, bar that left at least a dozen people dead.
‘’At what point do we finally wake up to the reality that we remain the only advanced society that tolerates such horror on such a regular basis?” Murphy said.
The new law immediately criminalizes the purchase of parts to make “ghost guns,” so called because their lack of serial numbers makes them untraceable.
It also disallows not only the manufacture of 3-D guns, but also distribution of their printer computer code -- enabling users to bypass licensing laws and possess plastic weapons that may go undiscovered in metal detectors. The weapons’ future is under legal debate nationally: A federal judge in August ordered Texas-based Defense Distributed not to sell such blueprints after President Donald Trump’s administration in July settled a lawsuit allowing it to do so. New Jersey joined 20 other states in a letter criticizing the settlement.
