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Of course, New Jersey doesn’t want Vinroe to comply with the law while still selling to law-abiding New Jersey citizens. They want him out of business entirely.
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 orderAG legal opinion, 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. While the press releases on the Vinroe lawsuit emphasize the unfinished receivers, the actual torts cover a gun merchant having insufficient controls for any gun-related product: the Hoppes #9 example is genuinely within the bounds of the statute’s text.
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.
(EDIT: cleaned up some sentences, corrected the Pennsylvania attempted to ban receivers by legal opinion, not executive order.)
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.
More importantly, I think there is now a circuit split with the 7th that is more likely to merit cert. The Court presumptively (although, who knows) denied cert in a previous case (Highland Park?) to let things percolate. They have now definitely percolated.
Right now, Viramontes is up on the AR-15 and some assault weapon bans, and has been granted cert before this opinion released. Weirdly, the magazine bans are all held, and some age-related cases that have a large and growing circuit split were denied cert. No idea what's going on.
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