An overbearing government, in-fighting amongst advocacy groups, and because “everything we've been told [about permitting in N.J.] has been twisted facts,” created the perfect storm for the official formulation of two new organizations. Mark Cheeseman founded a Facebook group, the New Jersey Firearm Owners Syndicate, a number of years ago. The group was to serve N.J. gun owners by giving them a free and open platform to exchange information. Recently, Cheeseman and a board officially formulated the New Jersey Firearm Owners Syndicate as a 501(c)(4).

“So the Facebook page itself, I probably started around 2014,” Cheeseman said in an interview. “The main reason for starting the page was because when I first got, I guess you could say involved in this,..I was really looking for more information than anything.”

There was a big problem that Cheeseman said he encountered while going from group to group online while looking for a good spot to exchange ideas.

“The one thing that I noticed [that was] the worst in all these groups – and it was a hell of a lot worse then – was the big amount of infighting and disagreement back then,” Cheeseman noted. “I mean, it was bad…[I decided] I was going to make a page where everybody can come into the page and they can, you know, they can advertise, they can do whatever they want. They can come here [and] speak freely. And I'll try to put a cap on some of the infighting in here.”

Why Cheeseman was so focused on getting information back then had to do with him entering the fray of becoming an eventual plaintiff. In the past he described the area in New Jersey where he lived as being a nice place but one that was starting to have some issues with the criminal element sneaking in. It was then that he decided that he wanted to apply for a N.J. permit to carry.

“He just wants to exercise a Constitutional right, and someone told him ‘no,’” Jay Factor, a founding board member of the Syndicate and historian, said when we chatted with him. “And if you understand March Cheeseman, you just don't tell March Cheeseman ‘no.’”

Cheeseman and Factor connected around 2014. Cheeseman recollected his introduction to Factor. “I'm like, who the f*ck is this guy?” Cheeseman asked himself when he started seeing Factor’s posts. “I'm reading more and more of his stuff. And I'm like, ‘Who is this guy who has a treasure trove of s*it that I have been looking for?’” It was then that their working relationship and eventual friendship started.

Factor was drawn to the Syndicate because of his own prior application for a permit to carry in 2006. Factor said that the process for him to apply and be denied took over two years, well over the statutorily defined timelines at that time.

“I think I make it into court in 2008. It's pretty close to the same week that Heller came out, so I don't even have time to digest Heller,” Factor reminisced. “And it wouldn't have even mattered because I didn't understand Siccardi and I didn't understand Perezs, and I didn't understand Borinsky…Because I didn't think anything had happened in New Jersey in 1969, 1970, and 1990 – 1971 mattered when it came to the Second Amendment.”

The pair would navigate several lawsuits, applications, and filings over the years. Ultimately, Cheeseman made three applications for permits to carry, and he also brought on a successful challenge that took down New Jersey’s stun gun/taser ban. 

One of Cheeseman’s permit to carry denials made it all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States, only to have it denied certiorari. Cheeseman is also the lead plaintiff in a challenge to N.J.’s so-called “assault weapons” ban, which was partially successful at the Federal District Court level, and was combined with two other cases – Association of New Jersey Rifle and Pistol Club’s assault weapons ban and magazine capacity restriction challenges.

Factor played a pivotal role in an amicus brief filed in support of that case, other cases, and provided other strategic support over the years.

In post-Bruen 2022, Factor was in the process of targeting Monmouth County over the way the judges were handling the issuance of permits. A pile of funds were raised in support of Factor’s plight and that began what was known as the peanut butter and jelly fundraiser.

Monmouth County judges were issuing permits with all kinds of restrictions, up to and including a requirement that permit holders carry several page court orders with them while exercising their Constitutional right. The judges were essentially legislating from the bench, Perhaps they were foreshadowing some of the elements that ultimately ended up in the Bruen response law, shockingly without there being any kind of conspiracy, what-so-ever – sarcasm added.

Factor’s efforts were mooted when he was issued a “clean” permit to carry from the corrupt court. The focus and funds from the peanut butter and jelly fundraiser then shifted to Koons, a challenge spearheaded by the Second Amendment Foundation, Firearms Policy Coalition, Coalition of New Jersey Firearm Owners, and New Jersey Second Amendment Society. Koons is challenging N.J.’s Bruen response law, the so-called “carry-killer.” By October of 2022, Cheeseman was also finally issued his permit to carry.

A number of events transpired and the pair saw the need to be able to officially fundraise for challenges to the laws they wanted to bring on. It became apparent that they needed to be able to be the custodians of any funds that came in for them to be allocated for the litigation efforts they saw fit.

While many post-Bruen events led to Cheeseman and Factor seeing the need to make the Syndicate an official organization, other activists and advocates newly came into the fold. The Bruen response bills, laws, and processes opened many eyes, with people seeing just how badly corrupt New Jersey and their ilk really are.

A group of patriots bonded in Trenton when they met waiting to testify against the carry-killer bill. The immediate outcome was the formulation of the GardenStateGuns reddit page.

After GardenStateGuns launched, the building of the New Jersey NICS Research Center began. The NNRC began as an aggregate of data concerning NICS delays in New Jersey, but as more and more people came onboard, it exploded into a near one-stop-shop for anything “gun control” related in the Garden State. NNRC has become an invaluable resource for those seeking data on anything the State of New Jersey is doing related to firearms.

Everyone seemed to come together at the Syndicate social media page to share information. With the growing need to lobby and litigate, as the New Jersey Firearm Owners Syndicate was forming as an official organization, the group also saw the birth of a sister organization, the Civil Liberties Policy Research Center of New Jersey. The CLPRC was put together to act as the lobby arm of the Syndicate. While both groups are 501(c)(4)’s, it was important to be separate, with different missions, even if there were to be a leadership overlap.

CLPRC leadership consists mostly of GardenStateGuns reddit mods, and also has adopted the New Jersey NICS Research Center as one of their official projects.

“Our primary nexus to the world is through the Facebook group itself, right? And the Facebook group itself is inherently political, right?” Joe LoPorto, a board member of the Syndicate and the director of government affairs of CLPRC, explains the why of the c4 status over the c3. “The restrictions that are applied to 501(c)(3) organizations, with regards to political activity is…is onerous. So if we, if we had tried to set up a foundation and tried to run as a, c3, I mean, just from a risk management point of view, it was going to be difficult for us to comply with the political restrictions associated with those types of organizations.”

LoPorto, like many newly minted activists in New Jersey, was brought to the Syndicate – and got energized to get involved – because of the way all three branches of government in the Garden State behaved post-Bruen.

“I think what brought me, I guess, to the forefront in Syndicate, is because when, when A4769 [N.J.’s Buren response bill], was going around through the various levels of committees, a bunch of guys were sort of spontaneously coordinating to develop groups of volunteers to go down and testify in Trenton,” LoPorto said of his initial involvement on the Syndicate. “So I just started using Syndicate as a way to get people to come down and help us out. At some point, Mark tapped me to be one of the admins for the group, and then I just evolved from there. I think that was purely accidental on some level.”

LoPorto, in addition to being the director of government affairs of the Civil Liberties Policy Research Center of New Jersey, he is filling the role of director of legal operations of the Syndicate.

“We're planning on trying to work with other groups and do the same thing we've been doing in the past, to team up with other groups,” Factor said about the Syndicate’s path forward. “But we would like our name on a case, and we would like credit for raising the money and credit for the idea of the case. It’s pretty much that simple.” He summed it up best in a few sentences, “Like, why are we doing this? We're doing this to f*cking file cases. We're doing this to win f*cking cases.”

After having a chance to sit down and chat with a number of the board members of both the New Jersey Firearms Owners Syndicate and Civil Liberties Policy Research Center of New Jersey, it sounds like they have lofty but achievable goals. Members of both groups already hit the ground running and attended the 2024 Gun Rights Policy Conference, hosted by the Second Amendment Foundation and Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms. I got a chance to get to know them a bit while at the conference and they're energized.

If you’d like to learn more information about the two groups, be sure to visit their homepages at:

https://njfos.org/

And

https://www.clprc.com/