Congressman Frank Pallone heads a roundtable discussion at the IHOP in Keyport on 8/6/18
*Photos by Ron Miskoff

By: Ron Miskoff

KEYPORT – Rep. Frank Pallone, Jr., is worried.

He is distressed because he believes the Trump administration and the Republican majority in Congress do not see the danger in the proliferation of plastic guns —weapons that can easily be brought through airline security to make their way onto commercial airliners.

Referring to the guns as “3D guns,” Pallone, at a news conference held Aug. 6 in a restaurant in Keyport, discussed the new type of guns. They can be “printed” on 3D printers, offering a unique way to endanger the public.

Rep. Frank Pallone, Jr.

The session was attended by seven members of the news media in Pallone’s 6th District. It contains 20 municipalities in Monmouth County and 12 municipalities in Middlesex County, including Perth Amboy, South Amboy and Sayreville.

3D printers have been around for years. They carve out items and can reproduce almost any shape from blocks of plastic or metal. They can be used to make simple items like key holders, whistles, toys, combs and toothpaste squeezers. 

But, recently, a gun rights group blocked downloads of 3D gun plans from its website after a federal judge sided with states arguing that the postings could help criminals and terrorists manufacture the items as weapons. While a federal judge did not actually block the placement of gun plans on the internet, Pallone is worried that “the cat is out of the bag,” and that people who want to make plastic guns from printers that sell for as little as $500 will present a new and unique danger to the public. He said the guns don’t show up on airport security cameras.

“We have universal background checks already,” said Pallone. “We will now need limits on ammunition… the technology is such that if [Congress] doesn’t have a consensus, we can’t do stuff we’ve done for years.”

He was referring to the coalitions that Congress has been able to build over the years, even with opposing parties in power. The ability for members of Congress to “reach across the aisle” that separates political parties and make deals with opponents has dried up, he said.

He declared that the technology on gun safety has raced ahead so fast that Congress needs to act. But with the current leadership in power, it is unlikely that any action to stop plastic gun plans from proliferating — or many other ways that weapons can be a danger to the public — is likely in the near future.

“You can make it at home,” Pallone said of the plastic guns, “and it’s easier to kill people without tracing the weapons.”

He blamed the Trump administration for creating the strategy of not negotiating across the aisle. 

“The president is a divisive figure,” said Pallone. “Even Republicans are afraid that the right wing will turn on them. The right wing is strident and aggressive. They don’t believe in government — that it has a role in health care and so on.”

Pallone not only blames the fractured leadership in Congress; he puts most of the blame on President Donald Trump personally. Pallone has been a leading critic of the president and opened his news conference criticizing him on key issues of importance to New Jersey and the nation, including:

• lack of actions on the Gateway Tunnel;

• help to poor families;

• the de facto repeal of the Affordable Care Act; and, 

• immigration issues, sanctuary cities, and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA).

Pallone said that Trump effectively repealed DACA, which had allowed children brought into the United States from other countries to stay in the U.S. It allows these children to work and go to school. Trump, said Pallone, put these young people in danger. Now they may be deported or detained, he said. He believes the issue will eventually go to the U.S. Supreme Court, and, considering the make-up of the court, DACA will be repealed.

In fact, Pallone was upset about many immigration policies of the current administration, including the issue of separating children from their parents at the border of the United States and Mexico. 

“Trump is saying essentially there will be no more legal immigration,” said Pallone.

Pallone also was riled about the Trump administration’s treatment of the environment.

Agency rulings, the rejection of the Paris agreement to reduce greenhouse gases and the scrapping of fuel emission standards are only the beginning of the problem, he said. By allowing more “gas guzzlers” on the road, he added, Trump will be surprised that Americans will not want to buy these cars in big numbers.

Pallone is also angered about Trump’s treatment of foreign nationals who are trying to gain entry into the U.S.

To compound his sense of apprehension about the current administration of the majority in Congress, Pallone thinks that Facebook, the online social network, can pose many dangers to the American political system. In a hearing on April 11 in Congress, Pallone personally lambasted Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and chair of Facebook, in part, for not stopping Cambridge Analytica from obtaining information on 87 million Facebook users.

“You vacuum up data but fail to keep it safe,” he told Zuckerberg, speaking as the ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

He heard Zuckerberg reply that his industry needs to be regulated, but Pallone asked “How?”

He did not get a definitive answer.

“We need baseline protection that stretches from internet service providers to data brokers to app developers,” Pallone told Zuckerberg, “to anyone else who makes a living off of our data.”