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Notes -
Reasonable Men
The New Jersey Attorney General has filed a complaint:
The interesting thing isn't that New Jersey is suing some random gun or parts manufacturer: compared to Platkin v Defense Distributed, someone who actually sold actual physical components and has shipped something into the state is comparatively restrained.
The interesting bit is that, by the law's plain text, nothing Vinroe did was illegal. A large part of the actual case rests on him being a public nuisance, not having reasonable controls that he couldn't implement, giving good-faith advice on complying with New Jersey's registration and permit system, and then the complaint spends a lot of time arguing he was violating criminal laws he didn't and couldn't break.
Vinroe sold 80% receivers, but only where and when it was lawful: he stopped the sales the day the ATF regulation went in effect, and paused them when Pennsylvania tried to ban them by executive order. He even wrote a declaration in support of Vanderstock, the poor schmuck, highlighting how much this decision impacted his business. Not only did federal and state law permit him to make these sales without doing a background check, even though he had an FFL 07, he could not legally do a background check on buyers of non-firearms had he wanted to. To be fair, he was clearly also philosophically opposed to it. Vinroe is bombastic about Second Amendment advocacy - he bought a gun show specifically because the previous owner buckled under public pressure on 80% receivers - but he was reasonable about it, and as fastidious about compliance with federal and Pennsylvania law as you'd expect for someone who signed up to allow warrantless inspections from the ATF.
The state's argument is that he advertised to lawful customers, encouraged them to comply with the law, and that's not only not enough, but evidence of ill intent, and his liability for the criminal acts of others, regardless of whether those criminal actors bought their products from him.
Nor is it unlawful for him to sell to New Jersey residents.
The complaint highlights that he didn't check driver's license for state of residence, but it focuses on a statute that requires he "prevent the sale or distribution of a gun-related product to a straw purchaser, a firearm trafficker, a person prohibited from possessing a firearm under State or federal law, or a person who the gun industry member has reasonable cause to believe is at substantial risk" and complies with all provisions of State and federal law and does not otherwise promote the unlawful sale, manufacture, distribution, importing, marketing, possession, or use of a gun-related product". Some of these tests, like the prohibited person one, could only be achieved with that NICS check he can't legally use; the rest he was doing and are entirely independent of state of residence.
Reasonable Buyers
In fact, in 2022, it wasn't even clear it was unlawful for New Jersey residents to buy the kits from him and take them home. New Jersey helpfully describes the legislative history in the complaint, pages 27-28, but to summarize, New Jersey declared it illegal to :
That is, it's illegal to purchase a "firearm frame or receiver" as defined by New Jersey law to include 80% receivers, and it's illegal to transport, ship, sell, or dispose of a manufactured unserialized firearm, but there's not actually a law against bare possession. Arguably it'd even be lawful to manufacture and possess in the home, though the transport/dispose rule would make that very ill-advised. I'm not sure why. This is New Jersey, they will quite happily consider banning bare possession of unregistered body armor, but it's also New Jersey politicians, so maybe they just know so little about guns that they didn't realize there was a difference between 80% and 100%. And, traditionally, a state's law only applies to acts within that state.
And it's actually reasonable for some buyers to want to comply in this way: a New Jersey resident that wants to own a handgun legally could use a 'ghost gun' kit, never assemble or manufacture it in New Jersey out of a good-faith attempt to comply with the law, manufacture it in Pennsylvania and store it in a Pennsylvania locker once assembled. Because federal law prohibits the sale of a serialized handgun to a New Jersey resident out-of-state in almost every circumstance, and New Jersey is willing to restrict permits to purchase in-state based on bare speech or 'quality of character', they can't buy a normal handgun despite being perfectly law-abiding citizens, and this was a theoretically-legal alternative. Or they could buy one and stick it in a lockbox, under the (woefully optimistic) hope that New Jersey's laws about manufacture might change some day. Or they could buy one to resell later, or to only manufacture after they move out.
Reasonable Jurists
Which obviously couldn't stand by the time the courts got to it:
Oliver, the defendant in that case, was prosecuted under the theory that the intent to manufacture happened in New Jersey, even if the purchase happened outside of New Jersey, and the manufacture never happened. The appeals court held that worked fine in 2025. Didn't even need to treat it like an attempted manufacture or attempted possession of an assembled gun. Partly because Oliver is an incredibly unsophisticated defendant who had already served his full sentence by the time of the appeal's oral arguments, partly because it's a New Jersey appeals court, what did you expect to happen?
This has some hilarious ramifications under its own logic: it's a published state appeals court opinion declaring that a state law prohibiting actions that's legal in other states, of actions only happening in other states, can still apply criminal punishment, and even an expansive read of its dicta only requires that the 'intent to manufacture' form in or involve the state of New Jersey in some way for a jurisdictional hook. I don't think the NJAG's office is going to start trying to prosecute people who permanently flee the state so they can possess an unserialized gun again, or who never enter the state but buy a kit with the stated intent of assembling it in New Jersey sometime in the future, but I probably shouldn't give him ideas, either.
Reasonable Consequences
But back to Vinroe, the other unsophisticated defendant.
He's obviously doomed.
In front of a fair court, there'd be a lot to discuss about accomplice liability in New Jersey requiring purposeful intent to promote or facilitate the offense, which many of the causes of action rely on. All of those legitimate, legal, or reasonably-perceived-as-legal uses of his products, even by New Jersey buyers, could matter in theory. But he's in New Jersey's Chancery system, it's incredibly deferential to the legislature in general and especially on firearms, it's a civil case so the burden of proof is low, and on appeal every factual question would be reviewed solely for clear error and every legal question will find the same state-favored lean. He still sells (and maybe ships) scopes in or near New Jersey under the business name Gideon Optics, so the injunctive relief about 'reasonable controls for gun-related products' isn't moot, even if it's against federal law for Vinroe to actually use the NICS system for anything but a gun, so the regulation is essentially a ban on sales into New Jersey written to exploit National Pork Producers. The actual legal protections against a state punishing actors for behavior that was legal where the act happened, like BMW v. Gore and State Farm v. Campbell, are very doctrinally narrow and mostly limit the state's attempts to pile on punitive damages even were they recognized. The court's logic about extraterritorial reach expands well beyond him, but Vinroe had e-mails and billboards in New Jersey, and even if they were advertising purely legal services to people perfectly allowed to buy them, that's enough to put him squarely under New Jersey's jurisdiction.
And the bulk of the financial liability would fall downstream of the public nuisance and negligence torts, which don't care about any of the above, and have been custom-written to evade the PLCAA, and which are entirely insulated from the narrowing principle in Smith & Wesson v. Estados Unidos Mexicanos (because there's a specific statute) and which SCOTUS has ignored in previous abuses like Soto v Bushmaster. Vinroe's settled before where his personal costs were an injunction to comply with the law, but the demands here would go far further. New Jersey's biggest desire is an injunction leaving a New Jersey cop looking over Vinroe's shoulder for the rest of his life ("injunctive relief as is necessary to prevent continuing harm") for all sales regardless of destination, but they probably also would be quite happy if he's beggared ("pay accrued and future costs that the State of New Jersey and any other person or entity incurs in abating the public nuisances", "monetary damages and punitive damages in an amount to be determined at trial, including interest thereon", "unjust enrichment and other restitution"). Because they're suing him in his personal capacity, and because they're plead as punitive damages with willful malice, they can't be discharged in personal bankruptcy, either.
The last big protection against these sort of crusading legal activism is the protection of his state of residence. Since Vinroe isn't a fugitive from justice, the legal obligation to extradite him much weaker; since public policy adds a ton of exceptions to the general full faith and credit clause, the legal obligation to actually enforce a judgment against Vinroe isn't strictly mandatory. There's other cases resting on these specific distinctions.
Back to Oliver again, though? He got pulled over by New York cops in cooperation with the Pennsylvania Attorney General, the same man that tried to ban 80% receivers by executive order, who is now Pennsylvania Governor.
So Vinroe has no hope, there. Pennsylvania isn't going to enact a Second Amendment shield law; they're more likely to start the enforcement before New Jersey asks. If Vinroe's planning ahead, he's put his finances into crypto and mattresses, and planning a move to Texas (if he trusts Paxton) or Missouri (if he's actually smart).
Reasonable Legal Tactics
Which leads to the other thread. Yes, court cases are generally painfully slow, but New Jersey's lawsuit against Vinroe here was filed this week, focusing on actions from 2022. There's a reason for that. They sued his companies, first, in 2023.
Indeed, the current lawsuit is heavily copy-pasted from that original complaint, to the point of neglecting several updates to the very cases it cites. The current NJAG at least fixed the transcription errors where New Jersey falsely quoted Vinroe in the same page it linked to the video of the real quote, though even with the corrections, it's still describing Vinroe's discussion of legal demand incentivized by bad Californian law as if it were encouragement to exploit illegal demand. But the obligation to put reasonable effort into investigating claims before filing is more a guideline than a rule; it doesn't matter here. The state's legal theory might depend on Vinroe specifically cultivated unlawful uses of his products, but that's not going to get a state lawyer in trouble for making not-exactly-factual claims in a complaint.
That previous lawsuit, in all fairness, looked as if it were a prolonged tantrum by an unsophisticated defendant. NSSF has a parallel suit against a similar New York law, which they've had to refile because New York disclaimed enforcement for months and then immediately sued Glock after SCOTUS punted, and they're still not going to touch this guy. And to be fair, it very likely was a tantrum: Vinroe, a man who had prioritized minimizing paperwork and record-keeping to the extent allowed by law, spent two years trying to fight simple discovery at every step, only to dissolve the companies in Chapter 7 bankruptcy after sanctions hit.
Of course, if he hadn't fought like a spoiled toddler, he'd have been required to give the New Jersey Attorney General a complete list of every person who bought a ticket from his gun shows, whether or not they'd purchased anything. Being a brat worked, and nothing else would have. You can't appeal a discovery order; just sanctions for non-compliance (and then, not the form of sanctions Vinroe was hit by, and the only nondiscretionary appeal would be to NJ state appeals courts). In the unlikely situation that a more persuasive and compliant Vinroe could have talked the Chancery judge into restricting the use of the submitting records, the records would still have ended up in the hands of the NJAG's office or a private legal office paid by New Jersey, which has not historically been a very strong wall of separation, and that 'order' would have been nothing more than a pinky swear.
I'm not going to pretend Vinroe was motivated out of the goodness of his heart: on top of being an obstinate son-of-a-bitch, the reputational effects on his businesses are pretty obvious. But if that tantrum is the primary thing keeping hundreds of New Jersey citizens from getting pre-dawn raids for the bare possession of goods that they reasonably believed were lawful to purchase and possess, and a few of those citizens from getting their skulls ventilated, the professional law-abiding perspective starts looking a lot less ideal.
That's only going to matter so long as he keeps the records private, and this lawsuit is going straight back to asking for them. The only real privacy is having a boating accident with a laptop, or a burn pile with receipts, and those are undeniably spoliation of evidence, certain to be caught and resulting in every adverse inference against him.
Every Reason For His Conduct Save One
... so, what's that actually do? More monetary damages to the man who's going to be stuck eating cat food the rest of his life if judgement attaches? An adverse inference by a chancellor at a bench trial already predisposed toward the state, for a fact pattern the state already has an on-record conviction that proves the existence case that's the only thing it really needs? A faster push to an injunction to comply with a manufacturing regulation that SCOTUS has already given the thumbs-up, and that the man has been complying with for four years? A harsher injunction for scope sales the rest of the damages have made sure he doesn't want to sell Hoppes #9 to anyone in the state? Criminal charges for a man who has every reason to treat the whole state as predisposed to arrest him on sight already?
The ramifications are morbid enough from what it's encouraging Vinroe to do, or for the specific case of Vinroe's buyers, but they extrapolate well beyond that, pretty quickly.
New Jersey is infamously strict about firearms law and scienter: "When dealing with guns, the citizen acts at his peril" comes from a court case where a man was given a firearm after winning a police target match, never using it, and then being held liable regardless of whether he knew it broke a law enacted a few years later. Coincidentally, New Jersey has recently demanded over a dozen FFLs provide records related to every Glock sale in the state since 2016. California has reclassified older model Glocks as machine-gun-convertible devices, prohibiting new sales; New York has a sale-or-transfer ban; Maryland adds manufacturing one to the list. New Jersey has a bill up to reclassify previously-lawful handguns as assault weapons.
Did you know that a state's subpoena power is not constrained to its geographic boundaries?
So there's a strong incentive to start treating with unreasonable men.
Other Fun Cases
ANJRPC finally dropped, in about the most expansive way possible. Would make all of the above rant hilariously irrelevant if its logic was applied in breadth, but probably going to be cut down to dicta by lower courts, and maybe result in New Jersey throwing assault weapons a grandfather clause.
Knife Rights v Bonta is about what you'd expect after Teter, but come for the funny VanDyke dissent, stay to see how many BDSM double entendres he can fit in while daring his colleagues to complain about it as if he were saying "swinging dicks" again.
Hawaii's state appeals court is trying to show hands at SCOTUS. Funny in a much more morbid way, in the sense that it takes an otherwise credible and serious discussion involving a pretty awful crime and then a possibly-wrong conviction that resulted in a long prison sentence... and then spends 72-78 trying to yell about SCOTUS being racist on entirely unrelated matters.
Different states have different laws. If only there was some entity with the power to regulate interstate commerce, this would all be so much simpler.
Personally, I think it is (mostly) reasonable to expect people to follow the laws of the state they are in. Nor do I have a problem with having them stand trial for something which is criminalized by both states if they commit a crime remotely: if you send a mail bomb to a different state, shipping you to that state for your trial seems fair enough.
If your state (and federal laws) did allow you to ship weed over state lines, then it should not have to worry about how the state of the recipient -- or any states on the package's route, for that matter -- might feel about it. Likewise with shipping or serving porn. If Utah does not want porn to move through their fibers, that should between them and any telcos who own fibers in Utah, not people running servers.
On the other hand, as a member of the rest of the world over whom the US would totally claim jurisdiction I see some poetry in the equality in injustice between an European who has to keep US laws and a Pennsylvanian who has to keep NJ laws.
That only makes sense if our founding document and basis of all law and government had a clause that forbid the government from infringing on mail bombs.
They shouldn't be able to do this at all, in any way. It is forbidden from the federal government, and, due to 14th amendment jurisprudence, from the states as well. Any comparison with guns needs to make that fact apparent and it needs to have some comparison, too.
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What do you mean? That is exactly the evidence that he's motivated out the goodness of his heart. Why else be stubborn?
I really like these writeups, but god they're depressing. What's the point of a constitution limiting the government if all three branches simply ignore it? How can the Supreme Court stand by allowing citizens to act at their own peril on something that the federal government specifically is forbidden from infringing?
We are being disarmed, so that we can be replaced by a more compliant labor force.
The Supreme Court (except Cranky Clarence) are elitists; they don't want the population to have guns. But the right to keep and bear arms is an important point on the right side of their constitutional debate society. So they deliberately allow lower and state courts to reduce pro-gun decisions to nullities.
Maybe, now that Roe v Wade is overturned, we can get a new litmus test for conservative judges.
Or maybe we can get Van Dyke on the supreme court.
Nobody wants that. Trump is an elitist as well. So is Vance, as Hillbilly Elegy proves (you can't write such a book without looking down). Obviously Rubio is. They're all satisfied with "You have the right to keep and bear arms, but that doesn't mean you can own or carry a gun"
And yet, we have gained serious erosion of the NFA, and concealed carry has steadily advanced.
Why don't you move, out of curiosity?
And yet, I can't buy an AR-15 or AK-47, I can't buy a 15 round magazine, and I can't manufacture my own firearm from materials without breaking the law.
However, maybe the third circuit will force SCOTUS to act on Viramontes vs Cook County.
Viramontes was already granted cert on June 30th.
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Silencers are now untaxed but the NFA paperwork (and presumably the Fourth Amendment waiver they swear isn't there) is still in effect. And of course they're banned in blue states.
I don't move because of family reasons.
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