A serial killer is on the loose in Atlantic City.  So far, he has five known victims, all of them prostitutes.  There is even speculation that the Atlantic City perp is the same one who committed 5 murders in England and is known as the “Ipswich Ripper.”

In the meantime, while the police do their job as historians and try to assemble the known facts and hope they can find a trail that leads to the murderer, what’s a working girl to do in AC to stay alive?  Will the police defend them and keep them alive?  Well just last October, a Camden judge has reaffirmed the fact that the police have no duty to protect individual citizens.  The Supreme Court has stated this fact many times over.  So the prostitutes are doing the logical thing that any biological entity does to preserve its own life:  prepare for defense.   That’s not so easily accomplished here in New Jersey.  Nearly every means of self-defense is illegal.  So the prostitutes are ‘arming’ themselves with the only thing they legally can:  mace.

But remember, this is New Jersey and the legislature has put its grubby hands all over this common non-lethal means of self-defense.  According to N.J.S 2C:39-6i, a ‘civilian’ cannot carry more than ¾ of an ounce of a chemical irritant for self-defense.  Before you decide to let your life depend on an NJ legal quantity of mace, just take a look at how effective it can be:

"The contents of one can of pepper spray was deployed on the dog," Officer Goga reported. "This was ineffective and only caused the dog to lick its face." [emphasis added-ed]

In fact, even the LEO community has acknowledged the ineffectiveness of chemical irritants for defensive purposes.  Chemical irritants in falling out of favor among police forces as they realize they've never achieved the 100% effective rate manufacturers promise. The study by the Police Review Commission of the City of Berkeley is one of the most frequently cited independent reviews of the effectiveness of pepper spray by law enforcement officers.  The Berkeley PRC concluded that OC pepper spray to be only effective 17% of the time in subduing a violent subject and 28% of the time only succeeded in making the subject more aggressive.  Over the past few years, police agencies have been more and more adopting the Taser for non-lethal pacification; a tool New Jersey also denies this highly effective defense tool to 'civilians'. (non-lethal in the sense that police deployment of Tasers are only responsible for 167 deaths at last count as of 1 year ago).  

This is the only legal tool the prostitutes of Atlantic City have to ‘arm’ themselves with for their own defense against a serial killer.  Not to say that I condone prostitution-- I certainly don’t feel they deserve to die for it.  Unfortunately, the unofficial position of the state of New Jersey they have no right to live.  None of us do.  Technically, the NJ Constitution grants us the right to self-defense but the legislature denies us the tools to do so.  A right you cannot exercise is no right.