2nd UPDATE:  Chris Christie, the Governor of New Jersey, has commuted the sentence of Mr. Aitkens to time served.  He's been sprung from prison.  His conviction appeal is still pending, and while I think he has a 'shot' at beating the transport/possession/hollow-nosed bullet charges, he has no hope of beating the illegal magazine charges.  Even so - fight on dude, fight on.  Also, it should be noted the NJ media finally picked up the story and ran with it after the commutation and national attention made the story impossible to ignore.  One thing he's got going for him is that his lawyer, Evan Nappen, is recognized as the top firearms law attorney in the state.  Mr Nappen published a book on NJ Gun law.  The text of the book that deals directly with State statutes is over 100 pages long.  Pause and consider that - NJ gun laws are so complicated and extensive it takes 100+ pages to explain it all in layman's terms.  It's ridiculous, pathetic, and sad.

UPDATED:  Brian Aitkens' plight got some national attention today on Foxnews.  Whether the notoriously anti-gun NJ news media will pick the story up remains to be seen.  NJ residents need to be made aware of this appalling miscarriage of justice, because if this can happen to Aitken, it can happen to anyone.

After the Thanksgiving holiday, this article on Philly.com published on Tuesday is the sort of stuff that should give us all heartburn.  As I said in my Thanksgiving greeting post, there are many things we can still be thankful for here in the US.  However,  malicious prosecutions by the State of New Jersey against this hapless gun owning resident is not on my list of things to be thankful for.  This article serves as a warning to those in other States:  If you want to exercise your right to keep and bear arms, you must remain forever vigilant to help block your legislature from enacting laws that only serve to ensnare otherwise productive honest members of our society.  Without vigilance, in the end, the result may be you being thrown in the slammer with the real criminal murderers, rapists, robbers and dead-end drug heads. 

The outrageous injustice described in the linked article doesn't need a whole lot of additional commentary save a few points:

1) The rabid anti-gun leader of CeaseFire NJ, Bryan Miller, is quoted in the article as declaring hollow nosed bullets (and large capacity magazines) as "illegal, period".  This is flatly false with respect to the ammunition.  While the State of NJ is the only state in the US that regulates hollow nosed bullets, they are not "illegal, period."  Under certain circumstances they can be illegal, and in others, they are most assuredly 100% legal.  Magazines holding greater than 15 rounds are banned in the State (for pistols and rifles), and there is no grandfathering on this.

2) It raises an eyebrow that the Philly.com article author would rely on the opinion of an anti-gun lobbyist regarding the legalities surrounding complex and confusing firearms and ammunition regulation in the State.  Surely Philly.com could have scraped up a lawyer or in-state law professor to offer an authoritative explanation.

3) While you can read about this injustice on the Philly.com website, and also find a fairly large number of blogs, legal oriented websites and the like by searching Aitkens' name on Google, where you won't find any articles discussing this injustice is in any of the major NJ media outlets.   I looked through 4 pages of Google hits and saw no URL from any NJ news orgs.  Another travesty.

Although Aitken's plight is currently being appealed, the bottom line is that the State took a harmless man and productive taxpaying member of society, and turned him into a criminal and societal liability, ruining his life in the process.  Now warehoused in a shit hole prison somewhere in the State of NJ, all at taxpayer expense, serving a sentence more severe than that of many violent crimes, all for violating confusing regulations that don't even exist in the vast majority of other states.  It's just sick.