The quest for a firearm in NJ

[Euler]

Slate said:→

I don't think I actually wanted a gun. I grew up in Newark, New Jersey, where there was this saying: People with knives get stabbed. People with guns get shot. The conventional wisdom was that it was safer to be unarmed. If someone mugged you, just give them what you've got.

... I'm Arab. Muslim. ...

... But as I wrote about gun culture for Slate and thought about my own relationship with guns, I became curious to own one of my own.

So in 2020, I applied for a Firearm Purchaser Identification, a permit to purchase a firearm that is required in New Jersey. After fingerprints, references, application fees, and months of waiting, I was told over the phone that I had no choice but to withdraw my application. The issue was a misdemeanor trespassing charge in New York from my street-photographer days. Under New Jersey law, that should not have disqualified me from owning a gun. I had never been convicted of a felony. No domestic violence charges. No mental health issues. It didn't matter. The Newark Police Department's firearm permitting office told me my application was being withdrawn. They insisted they were doing me a favor, and that a denial would bar me from reapplying if I got my record expunged.

... An Afro-Cuban neighborhood friend I went to high school with in Newark told me he had applied for his own permit and received it in just two weeks. When I explained that I tried multiple times and was still waiting months after my latest application, he looked genuinely confused. Then he asked what race I'd listed on the paperwork. "Other," I told him. He burst out laughing. "You idiot," he said. "You're supposed to put white."
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The suspicion that race is factored into applications ... is difficult to prove from a single application. A long wait can always be explained away. With a system built out of individual decisions, each one becomes small enough to fall through any number of administrative cracks.
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Ben Shore, the co-founder and director of Rise Against Hate, a nonprofit that uses data to investigate racial disparities, wanted to know what those decisions looked like in aggregate. The problem was that when he began looking at New Jersey's public dashboard of firearm permit approvals and denials, he told me the dashboard did not make it easy to see race. ...

So Shore and volunteers at Rise Against Hate rebuilt the data themselves. "We had to actually take all the numbers from all the dashboards and create our own dashboards just to get down to the bottom of it," he said. What they found, he says, was alarming. In Ocean County, he told me, "a Black person is about 50 times more likely to be denied a permit to carry versus a white person." Statewide, he said, the disparity was roughly 10-to-1.
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These weren't people who were legitimately disqualified, either. "We're not talking about people who are committing criminal acts. We're talking about a law-abiding citizen, somebody with a clean criminal record, somebody who's never been convicted of a crime, someone who applies for their firearm ID card," he said. ...
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And even Shore's study, he said, did not fully capture the issue. It counted formal denials, not withdrawals, like mine in Newark. "We did not count the withdrawals in the study," he said, "but we do know that there are many withdrawals." Indeed, my own application had not been officially denied. It had been withdrawn after a police officer told me I could not proceed unless I first expunged a misdemeanor that should not have disqualified me.
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Earlier this year, lawmakers reintroduced legislation in Trenton that would require the state to publicly report firearm permit approvals and denials by race, ethnicity, and gender. Supporters argue the measure is necessary because existing public dashboards obscure patterns that civil-rights advocates and researchers say have become increasingly difficult to ignore.
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... Joe LoPorto, a libertarian journalist who has spent years around Second Amendment litigation, drafted the bill that was introduced by New Jersey state Rep. Dawn Fantasia [R] that would have local agencies track the racial makeup of approvals and denials for firearm permits.
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LoPorto's argument begins with the very first gun laws. "If we were to go back in time and we look at firearms regulation in 1791, or in 1868 when the 14th Amendment was passed, we don't really have a long history of regulating firearms, except for in 1791," he said. "If you were Black, you couldn't own a firearm. If you were a Catholic, you couldn't own a firearm. If you were a Native American, you couldn't own a firearm." ...

This, he says, is precisely why the modern Supreme Court cases that remade American gun law are so dangerous. He pointed to the Bruen case in 2022 that required modern gun regulations to be justified through the nation's historical tradition of firearm regulation. "By creating a system where the government has to go back and link its current regulation to some heritage of regulation," he said, "all we've got is racism."
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I should say that not everyone thinks the history here is so clear. Chris Rasmussen, a historian at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey who studies crime and punishment in America, was less willing to draw one straight line for every modern gun restriction back to racist intent. ...
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Still, he did not erase the racial question. Rasmussen compared the way gun laws are enforced to the war on drugs. "You couldn't write the law to say people of color should receive longer sentences for possessing drugs. But you could enforce the law very selectively. You could arrest more Black men, and you could have judges give harsher sentences to Black men," he said.

That felt closer to what happened to me in Newark. The statute did not explicitly forbid me from buying a gun. But in the space between the law and the person reviewing your permit application, everything is subject to one human's impression of another. My friend in Newark said he didn't think twice about listing himself as white on his application. "It's 2026," he joked. "Good luck telling anybody what race they are."

That leads me to a twist that unfolded as I reported this story. Six years after I first applied for a firearm permit in New Jersey, I finally received one a few weeks ago. (I didn't even have to check "white.") The application that succeeded was submitted in January. Four months later, an approval arrived digitally in my inbox, without explanation. I can now legally purchase as many rifles as I want, and a handgun.
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Maybe gun ownership will remain something symbolic for me, and I'll keep putting off actually buying one. For now, having the permit feels like enough. I waited six years for the state to decide if I was allowed to be the type of person who owns guns. I can wait a little longer before deciding whether I am.

LoPorto's assertion that Bruen ensconces racism as justification for gun control is disturbing. If anything, it does the opposite. The assertion echoes Jackson's misguided questioning during Wolford oral arguments.