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.
The Permit to Carry Dashboard posts infographics, like the one below. At first glance, they are impressive. However, these numbers don’t tell the whole story. Let’s start with a few statements of fact.
- As a “may issue” state, New Jersey rarely issued permits to carry prior to the 2022 Bruen Supreme Court Decision, most often citing only a lack of “justifiable need” as the reason for denial.
- After Bruen, New Jersey, along with all the other may-issue jurisdictions, became a “shall-issue” state and was forced to begin issuing permits en masse to law-abiding residents because they could no longer use justifiable need to deny applicants.
- Between the Bruen decision in June 2022 and Governor Murphy signing A4769 into law in December 2022, permit-to-carry applications were executed through the state’s age-old process: police carried out an investigation, followed by the superior court deciding if a permit should be issued.
- With the passing of A4769, the state modified its process and now issues permits by the local police departments (or New Jersey State Police if a town does not have its own police department), after an individual has gone through the full application and approval process. That process includes a federal NICS background check, a New Jersey State Police background check, and a local background check, mental health check, and prescribed training and shooting qualification (click here for an explanation of that process).
- Permits are valid for two years and must be renewed through the same process. The process is now digital through the state’s website, replacing previous hard-copy applications.
- The data provided through the state’s Permit to Carry Dashboard is a limited data set going back to 2019 (not the full history of New Jersey’s permit issuance). The information presented on the infographic that is often circulated is the total number of permits issued within that six-plus-year timeframe. The data does not differentiate between expired permits from the total issued. Nor does it distinguish renewals of court-issued permits that are treated as “new” permits via the new, digital system.
By applying some simple formulas to sort the data, we can ascertain the following:
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.
Expired permits
- The number of permits that were issued since December 2019 but have now expired is 26,507.
- 24,949 of those permits have expired since Bruen.
Denied permits
- There were 442 permits denied since December 2019.
- Before Bruen, there were 39 denials reported. That equates to 2.5% of the approved applications.
- Since Bruen, the number of denied applications has risen to 403, but this is dwarfed by the number of approved permits, resulting in only 0.46% denied.
- Compared with the number of current, active permits, only 0.36% of applicants in the last two years have been denied.
- Until the U.S. Supreme Court threw out subjective permitting standards in Bruen, it was well known that applying for a New Jersey carry permit was largely futile. There was a clear chilling effect on the number of people even willing to attempt to obtain a carry permit.
- Since the right to carry a firearm for defense has been restored, the denial rate has dropped to less than a fifth of what it was when the deterrent of New Jersey’s subjective justifiable need loomed over every applicant. Since then, the number of permit holders has risen over 4,785% and continues to rise. As the graph below shows, there are between 2,000 and 4,500 applications per month over the last year, the vast majority being approved.
Today, the sensitive places ban affecting all permit holders is one of the many New Jersey anti-gun laws that are being challenged, documented extensively here.
Editor’s Note: This piece was a collaborative effort between guest writer and data analyst Stuart Gepp, News2A contributor John Petrolino, and the editorial team here.
Stuart Gepp is a U.K.-born immigrant who has been a U.S. Citizen for over four years. He has been shooting for three decades and lived through the pistol confiscation in the U.K. in 1998 – a dark time that must be avoided in the U.S. An established shooter with three Master classifications in IDPA and long-time match director, Stuart competes in at least three matches each month and enjoys teaching techniques to upcoming competitors as well as advocating for the Second Amendment.
John Petrolino is a US Merchant Marine Officer, 2024 SAF Journalist of the Year, CCRKBA Board Member, and author of Decoding Firearms: An Easy to Read Guide on General Gun Safety & Use. He is also a USCCA certified instructor, and NRA certified pistol, rifle, and shotgun instructor. Petrolino’s work primarily appears at Bearing Arms and AmmoLand News. You can find him on the web at The Pen Patriot.
