In March I reported on N.J. Attorney General Matthew Platkin’s office having released a “permit to carry dashboard.” The dashboard made publicly available a ton of great data that’s worth taking a look at. At the time, there seemed to be some missing data. I submitted an OPRA – N.J.’s equivalent of a Freedom of Information Act Request – for data that I thought was missing. The Attorney General’s office returned to me instructions on how to retrieve the data. Was the data always there from day one? I don’t really know. But I was not the only one who “noticed” this particular data was “missing,” and that data had to do with the race of permit to carry denials.

First, my request (W215472):

Seeking missing data from the permit to carry dashboard. Please provide the race/ethnicity of the permit to carry application denials in the state for the post-Bruen timeframe. ie; x number of whites were denied a permit to carry. Please cover all races/ethnicities that were tracked in regards to applications submitted.

As noted, the Attorney General’s office gave me the instructions on how to access the data – which the dashboard was noted to have been last updated on April 12th, 2024, and the date of their response was April 24th, 2024:

The Office of the Attorney General (OAG) is in receipt of your request for the race/ethnicity data of the permit to carry application denials in the state for the post-Bruen timeframe. Please be advised that that data you have requested is available via the Permit to Carry Dashboard: https://www.njoag.gov/permittocarry/. To display the data you are seeking, on the "Application Details" display, click on "Denied" in the lower right-hand section of the display. This will display the reported race/ethnicity of applicants who were denied permits. Your request with OAG is hereby closed.

I had a chance to look at some of the ethnicity data and all the numbers we’re looking at are “post-Bruen” through March 31, 2024.

While the Black population is considered “underrepresented” in applications, with 11.6% of applicants being Black and N.J.’s Black population being listed as 13.1%, I’m still impressed with those numbers. The deviation is a little over one point and that percentage point represents the shattering of the narrative that the Black population is not interested in law abiding gun ownership.

On the other hand, whites are also “underrepresented,” but that number does not include “white including Hispanic/Spanish origin.” There is a separate “Hispanic or Latino” demographic, to complicate things further. 53.8% applicants were” just white,” not including Hispanic/Spanish whites. The white population of N.J. is noted to be 55%.

Where things start to get startling is when we look at the denial data. .53% of white applications were denied, with 52 denied under “public health, safety, and welfare.” Contrast that to Black denials; 1.3% of Black applications were denied, with 26 denied under “public health, safety, and welfare.”

Black applicants are denied getting issued permits to carry in New Jersey at a rate of more than double that of whites.

Looking closer at the “public health, safety, and welfare” standard, we have more shocking data. Whites were denied .27% of the time under these subjective standards, with Blacks being denied .6% of the time. That’s also more than double. 2.2 times more Blacks are denied permits to carry over whites, under this subjective standard.

I extensively covered the “public health, safety, and welfare” standard back in March. As a recap, this standard is unconstitutional because it allows issuing authorities to use subjective standards to deny applicants the issuance of permits to carry. Seeing Blacks having this standard used as a denial criteria more than double that of whites should raise eyebrows. Why is  there such a racial disparity?

Much of our so-called “gun control” laws come well after the time of our founding, are not rooted in the text, and are only of the history and tradition of a time when those in power wanted to keep firearms from Blacks. In post-Bellum U.S., jurisdictions did everything they could to keep freed slaves from being able to take up arms.

The practice of keeping Blacks disarmed continued throughout our history in different jurisdictions and states. Permitting laws were established in particular to target the Black population. New Jersey is still clearly executing potentially racist practices when seeing who may or may not be armed. These statistics should alarm everyone.