The Second Amendment protects the right to keep and bear arms. That right necessarily includes the right to acquire arms by lawful means, including manufacturing them at home for personal use. As Joseph G.S. Greenlee has demonstrated, Americans freely built and repaired firearms throughout the founding era and well into the nineteenth century with no meaningful restrictions. Federal serialization requirements have long applied to commercial manufacture and sale by licensed manufacturers and importers. Extending those requirements to pure personal-use manufacture by non-licensees is a modern innovation without historical analogue. Under Bruen, such laws are presumptively unconstitutional. Moore v. Harper further confirms that state legislatures remain bound by constitutional limits even when addressing new technologies. The charges or regulatory enforcement must be rejected.

Portable note — New Jersey digital-instructions possession is not a completed manufacture count.

P.L.2025, c.255 (A4975 2R, approved January 12, 2026) is live New Jersey law, not the withdrawn 2026 A-1399 refile. N.J.S. 2C:39-3(o) makes it a fourth-degree crime for a person who is not licensed or registered to manufacture firearms to knowingly possess firearm digital instructions with the intent to manufacture a firearm. That is a files-plus-intent count. It is not California Penal Code § 29186 (aiding unlawful manufacture), not Colorado C.R.S. § 18-12-119 (3-D/CNC manufacture), and not a completed New Jersey unlicensed-manufacture count under N.J.S. 2C:39-9. Counsel should not charge-spot 2C:39-3(o) as an AB 1263 twin. Confirm compiled N.J.S. 2C:39-1 lettering before filing: chapters 255 and 363 both added a subsection (oo).

Under New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1 (2022), when the Second Amendment’s plain text covers an individual’s conduct, the Constitution presumptively protects that conduct. The government must then demonstrate that its regulation is consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.

The right to keep and bear arms necessarily includes the right to acquire arms through lawful means. One traditional and historically protected method of acquisition is the manufacture of arms by private citizens for their own use. As detailed in Joseph G.S. Greenlee’s comprehensive historical study, The American Tradition of Self-Made Arms, there were no meaningful restrictions on the manufacture of arms for personal use in America during the seventeenth, eighteenth, or nineteenth centuries. Gunsmithing and home manufacture were ordinary features of American life. The founding generation understood that the right to keep and bear arms would be hollow if citizens could not make the arms they needed.

Critically, the longstanding federal serialization regime has applied to commercial manufacture and importation by licensed manufacturers and dealers. There is no historical tradition of requiring private citizens who build a firearm solely for personal use to serialize it or to register themselves as manufacturers. Modern state PMF laws and expanded federal interpretations that collapse this distinction—treating home builders as manufacturers or imposing serialization and registration obligations on pure personal-use arms—are novel expansions. They differ in both “how” and “why” from the commercial regulatory framework that has existed since the Gun Control Act of 1968 and lack any founding-era or Reconstruction-era analogue.

Because these modern regimes find no support in the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation, they fail Bruen Step Two. The Supreme Court’s decision in Moore v. Harper, 600 U.S. 1 (2023), reinforces that state legislatures remain bound by constitutional constraints even when addressing new technologies or asserting broad public-safety authority. Legislatures cannot evade Second Amendment limits simply by labeling new manufacturing methods “dangerous.”

The same historical tradition that protects possession of common arms also protects the manufacture of those arms for personal use. Modern ease of manufacture does not diminish the constitutional protection. These laws therefore fail constitutional scrutiny and must be declared unconstitutional or held unenforceable as applied.

Portable note — New Jersey CAD/file possession is not Penal Code § 29186.

This block is the nationwide historical-tradition challenge to state PMF, serialization, and home-manufacture restrictions. California AB 1263 added Pen. Code § 29186 (misdemeanor aiding/facilitating unlawful manufacture, including 3-D/CNC by an unlicensed person) and expanded civil CAD-distribution liability. That is not this New Jersey count.

P.L.2025, c.255 (A4975 2R, approved January 12, 2026) is live charging law, not a pending 2026 bill. The 2026 A-1399 refile was withdrawn because this chapter already existed. Under the chapter, an unlicensed person who knowingly possesses firearm digital instructions (CAD files or other electronic code that can program a 3-D printer to produce a firearm, receiver, magazine, or component) with intent to manufacture a firearm is guilty of a fourth-degree crime (N.J.S. 2C:39-3(o)). Possession of the files without the intent element is not this crime. Completed unlicensed manufacture remains a separate 2C:39-9 theory.

Do not mint a New Jersey twin of AB 1263. Paste the homemade / personal-manufacture tradition argument. On a 2C:39-3(o) calendar, demand (1) that the files meet the chapter’s digital-instructions definition, (2) that the person is unlicensed, and (3) specific intent to manufacture. Confirm compiled 2C:39-1 lettering: P.L.2025, c.255 (digital instructions, January 12, 2026) and P.L.2025, c.363 (conversion device, January 20, 2026) both added a subsection (oo).