Here’s some more good news on the gun front. The rate of residents applying for gun permits in New York City and New Jersey has risen significantly after the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling in New York Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen.
This news is certainly welcome, but there is a caveat: The anti-gunners in each of these states are still trying to make it harder for people to keep and bear arms.
The increase in applications has occurred over the past two years, according to The Gothamist.
Applications for permits to carry guns have spiked in both New York City and New Jersey since the U.S. Supreme Court ordered New York and other states with strict regulations to make it easier for people to arm themselves in the summer of 2022.
In New York City, the NYPD received more than 11,000 applications for concealed carry permits between 2022 and the beginning of this March, according to the most recent police data. More than 1,800 people applied in just the first two months of 2024. The department won’t say how many applications its licensing division has approved.
In comparison, the NYPD received only 315 applications for concealed carry permits in all of 2021, according to police data.
In New Jersey, officials received about 41,000 new applications between 2022 and June 30, 2024. Almost 12,500 of them came in just the first six months of 2024, according to a Gothamist analysis of state data. Hundreds more applied to renew their existing permits. Gothamist found that officials approved more than 99% of applications during that time. The year prior to the ruling, only 274 people applied for new carry permits in New Jersey and another 381 applied for renewals, state data show.
New Jersey started publishing anonymized data on carry permits earlier this year. The database includes the number of applications, approvals and denials, as well as applicants’ races, genders, age ranges and counties. It does not include applicants’ names or addresses. It also provides the reasons why some applications were denied, such as a domestic violence record.
This trend shows that people want to exercise their Second Amendment rights. However, they were prevented from doing so by their state’s onerous gun laws, which are now on borrowed time because of the Bruen ruling.
Still, it is important to note that the anti-gunners haven’t given up on trying to hamper gun ownership. Last year, I wrote about the case of Dexter Taylor, a Brooklyn native who is now in prison for building so-called “ghost guns.”
His case not only illustrated the state’s contempt for the Second Amendment when it comes to people building their own firearms but also that New York City is still preventing people from arming themselves by slow-walking the application process and finding whatever reasons it can to deny permits.
The Supreme Court’s ruling in New York Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen declared that the state’s gun licensing scheme was unconstitutional and also opened the door for a plethora of firearm restrictions to be challenged in court. This prompted New York to pass even more gun laws to get around the decision. In fact, the NYPD is now granting fewer gun permits than it did before the Bruen decision.
The NYPD approved fewer new licenses to people requesting permits to carry or keep firearms in their homes or businesses in 2022 than the year prior, data obtained by THE CITY shows — despite the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that found a key provision of the state’s long-standing gun control law violated the Second Amendment right to bear arms.
In 2021, the NYPD — which vets firearm permits — received 4,663 applications and approved 2,591 of them, about 56%, all under the stricter “proper cause” standard the Supreme Court struck down last year. That standard required gun owners in New York to show “proper cause” in order to receive a permit to carry a weapon, but the court said licenses should be granted by default unless there was a specific reason to deny an applicant.
The low probability of obtaining a gun permit in New York City reinforces Varghese’s unconstitutionality argument. The lawyer is also challenging New York’s new licensing regime, which was created after the Bruen decision, arguing that it also is unconstitutional.
There is still more work to be done in the fight for gun rights. However, the fact that more New York and New Jersey residents seek to exercise their Second Amendment rights shows that the tide is turning in the direction of liberty.
