I have forgotten many of the details, but several years ago I read a brief account of the origin of the infamous Sullivan law. I believe Sullivan was a corrupt NYC police commissioner who was heavily involved in protection rackets on the NYC waterfront. The Italian and other recent southern European immigrants who worked the docks were being shaken down for protection money by Sullivan's Irish cops and other Sullivan-employed thugs. Many arms and legs were broken when protection money wasn't forthcoming, and quite few uncooperative dockhands went to the bottom of NY harbor wearing "cement shoes". Of course the immigrant workers didn't exactly cotton to that sort of treatment, so many of them began buying and carrying cheap handguns and often using them to poke multiple holes in Sullivan's thugs. That's when Sullivan went to the "right" people in the city government with the "right" kind of persuasion ($) and had the "Sullivan" law enacted. At first the law was selectively enforced against victims of Sullivan's rackets, but it soon came to be a useful tool for helping the NYC establishment keep the lower classes in their "place". Even today 90 years later the wealthy, the "politically well connected", and most celebrities have little trouble aquiring a handgun permit in NYC, but any and all others may as well not bother to apply.
Actually, if memory serves, good ole 2nd amendment-loving TX was one of the first, if not THE first, states to pass a law against "civilians" carrying firearms in public, either openly or concealed. I believe that law, which still exists in a modified form BTW, went into effect sometime in the late 1870's, but I could be off by a few years either way. Apparently, if we are to believe all the shoot'em up tales and movies about frontier times in TX, that law was also enforced on a very selective basis. My grandfather was born and raised in the 1870's and 1880's on a ranch in Bexar county, but I neglected to ask him before he passed away in 1955 about how strictly TX gun laws were enforced in those turbulent days.
I'm sure some New Yorker(s) and Texan(s) out there in FReeperland will kindly correct me if I'm wrong about any of this.
New Jersey used to have "strict-but-reasonable" gun laws ( as these things go ! )Unfortunately, the laws were used as a basis to enact incrementally tougher laws, that evolved into the truly draconian code we have today.
In the "Garbage State" , anything you pick up and use to defend yourself is a "weapon", the instant you deploy, or offer to deploy it as such.If Granny threatens a would-be mugger with her cane,she is ( theoretically at least ) chargeable with: possession of a weapon other than a firearm,possession of a weapon for unlawful purposes (eg: threatening another ),and, a NJ invention : terroristic threats.
As might be imagined, any person who actually uses a ( gasp!choke! ) firearm for self-defense is beyond the pale in NJ !
free the southland,sw