New Jersey was, for a long time, the poster child for why “may issue” laws were terrible for gun rights. People just couldn’t get a permit, even if their life depended on it, or so it would seem. Self-defense wasn’t considered a valid reason for a permit, at least in a general sense, and thus, many in the Garden State never got an opportunity to carry a firearm.
Then the Bruen decision changed all of that, forcing the state to issue permits to anyone qualified, without them having to supply any sort of reason for it. Basically, “Because I wanna” was just as good as someone whose reason was that they carried large amounts of cash through bad neighborhoods in the middle of the night. They couldn’t keep people out of it.
And New Jersey also makes permitting data public, which is actually kind of cool.
Over at News2A, they’ve taken a look at the data before, but now they’ve taken a new look and refined their understanding of it.
The State of New Jersey posts monthly data on permit to carry applications, approvals, and denials on a publicly-facing dashboard. At first blush, the numbers can be misleading. With a friend’s help, we dug in to better understand the numbers and paint the full picture.
Looking at the public Permit to Carry Dashboard, the numbers provided don’t tell the full story. There have been a great deal of misinterpretations of the data, including from our publication. With the help of data analyst (and friend to News2A), Stuart Gepp, we took a deeper look and offer our readers a thorough explanation of how to interpret this data.
Data analysis isn’t as easy as some people might like to believe, so having Gepp help out is important, and there are some very interesting datapoints worth discussing.
Approved permits
- All permits approved since the earliest date reported in the state’s data is the oft-reported number, 88,656.
- All permits that had been approved before Bruen was 1,558.
- Since Bruen, the state has approved 87,098 permits, many of which are now more than two years old and therefore no longer valid.
- In the two years leading up to the Bruen decision, there were 1,272 permits issued (this is the number of permit holders when Bruen was decided).
- In the two years following Bruen, there were 41,117 permits issued.
- Taking into account the expiration of permits older than two years, the data shows we have 62,149 people currently permitted to carry their handguns as of October 2025.
So the number of people with active permits is lower than the total number, which is useful information. Most of those more than 62,000 people, represent someone the state didn’t trust with a carry permit pre-Bruen, who now is carrying. It seems that just about none of them have done anything illegal. They haven’t engaged in shootings over things like parking spots or over disagreements in the grocery store, as many anti-gunners claim is inevitable with concealed carry numbers increasing.
Also of interest is that pre-Bruen, the denial rate was 2.5 percent for permit applicants. These often represent people who simply didn’t provide a good enough reason for a permit, but why is the number so low? Because, as many from the state have told me, they didn’t bother with applying because they knew they’d be denied.
Now, though, the number of permit applications is up, and the denial rate is a mere 0.46 percent. These are probably from people having something that happens to be disqualifying, but is at least objectively defined. Again, those who know they’ll be denied aren’t applying because they know what will happen, but a smaller number of denials is likely because some people don’t realize they have something disqualifying in their background.
And again, the problems anti-gunners claimed would materialize just haven’t happened. Quite the contrary, actually. The violent crime rate is down across the board, which suggests that maybe, just maybe, the gun control crowd is just as full of it as we’ve always argued.
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