Petrolino on The Prevalence of Systemic Racism in the New Jersey Gun Permitting Process

These were my remarks at the 2024 Second Amendment Foundation/Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms Gun Rights Policy Conference. The presentation is entitled, “The Prevalence of Systemic Racism in the New Jersey Permitting Process.”

These remarks have been cleaned up for clarity where needed. The presentation can be watched in full HERE or in the below embed. The slide deck can be accessed HERE. This presentation was given at the GRPC in San Diego, California last month.

The first slide — the QR code — will take you to a PDF of the slide deck if you want to follow along. More importantly, it’s going to have all of the citations that I’m talking about here. 

One of the things about New Jersey is they have some real panache for creating awesome activists. Prior to Bruen, carry was very limited. I got into this game many, many years ago. And what did we have in Jersey for years? No carry. We had all these problems. Then what do we have? Heller. We have McDonald.

Very important about McDonald…that was a Second Amendment Foundation case that incorporated the Second Amendment to the states. Let’s all keep that in mind. And subsequent to that, Bruen was able to be incorporated as well – [giving us] carry.

In 2022 SCOTUS basically said, “Thou shalt let the peasants have their pitchforks.” It wasn’t phrased quite like that, but you get the point.

Today we’re going to talk about New Jersey issuing permits to carry post-Bruen, subjective standards that are used in permitting still to this day, denial rates of permits to carry. We’re going to be looking at the black versus the white denial rates. We’re going to look at any responses from Attorney General Matthew Platkin. We’re going to look at any guidance that the Office of the Attorney General may have sent out to issuing authorities on the topic of racial bias, and we’re going to see what Governor Phil Murphy has to say about this data. And then we’re going to look at the current state of affairs.

The day after the Bruen decision came down, we had the attorney general say we can no longer use “justifiable need” in our permitting standards. That’s when people started to apply for permits to carry, after that.

By August of 2022, this is just confirmed permits you have to understand, there was a lot of anecdotal information with people saying, “Hey, I got my permit. I got my permit.” These were the two people [who] by mid August of 2022 [were] saying, “I got my permit. My name is this. Here’s a copy of my permit so you could look at it. Would you write about this?” That’s not too bad, the amount of time it took to get actual permit issuance.

December of 2022 is when [the New Jersey legislature] rolled out [, passed, and saw enacted] our Bruen-response law, the “carry-killer” we like to call it. That’s where we got a lot of sensitive locations added, and a whole bunch of other provisions.

One of the things that they did was a change to this 2c58(3)(c)(5) statute. And we’re going to go over this more in depth. But the change that they made was they added to the end of the statute “because the person is found to be lacking the essential character of temperament necessary to be entrusted with a firearm.” 

The statute was previously there, but they wanted to make it like a little bit “extra,” for whatever reason. 

In 2023 Attorney General Matthew Platkin said, we’re going to start collecting data on the issuance of permits to carry in New Jersey, and we’re going to give you all that information for free, like you don’t even have to ask for it. I don’t know why he did that, but he did, and what he did is he gave us a gold mine.

Earlier this year [the attorney general] rolled out that dashboard, and part of that dashboard, when that press item came out, and this is really cute, Governor Murphy was talking about why this data is so important. [He said]  “that there’s been consistent attacks from the gun lobby.”

Well, something that I want everybody in this room to know [about] is the Koons versus Platkin case and there’s the Siegel versus Platikin case. The Koons case is a Second Amendment Foundation backed challenge to the carry-killer law. All of you guys are part of the gun lobby. Congratulations. Yes, sure. [Applause]

So we got the dashboard. The first thing that I looked at on the dashboard was [subjective standards]. Handgun purchaser permits and permits to carry. This is all tied together. This is where they can subvert your rights again, just on opinion alone.

They will not issue a permit if the issuing authority – being the police chief or the state police barracks guy that’s in charge of that – “to any person where the issuance would not be in the interest of public health, safety or welfare because the person’s found to be lacking the essential character of temperament necessary to be entrusted With a firearm.” Okay? So that sounds just like “cause,” right?

They don’t like you? They’re not gonna give you a permit. As we know from footnote number nine from Bruen via Shuttlesworth said, the standards need to be “definite” standards. They need to be “narrow,” they need to be objective. This standard is still being used.

And then here are some of the numbers on that standard. More than 50% of the post Bruen permit to carry issuances were denied using the subjective standard. They’re still playing games. That’s kind of problematic.

I reached out to the Attorney General’s office. When I write to the Attorney General, I write to his press office, “can you comment?” and I carbon copy the Attorney General’s actual email address, which I got through Open Public Records Act requests. And they said, “Thanks for your email. The office declines to comment.”

They didn’t really care about the subjective denials that were going on.

But there was something missing from the dashboard. Me and a bunch of colleagues were talking. We could not find the race information. Full disclosure, not really sure if it was ever there. We just couldn’t find it. People smarter than me couldn’t find it, so I issued out an open public records act request seeking the missing data.

What did the OPRA response come back [with] from the records custodian? They gave me instructions on how to access that data. Again, I’m not going to say that the data wasn’t there, but I certainly couldn’t find it. But once we got our hands on that data, we were able to sit there and look at denials by race, and this is where things start to get a little bit crazy, if you look at the denial rates. And to give full disclosure, there aren’t that many denials. And we’ll get to those numbers at the very end, exactly how many denials there were as of September 11 of this year.

Black permit to carry applicants were being denied at a rate 2.45 times, pretty much two and a half times [more than] white, more than double. A lot of people in the comments section, they say,” Don’t read the comments,” well, there’s more criminal elements in the black community. We can discuss that. And the NAACP talks about the incarceration rate for black people in America. That’s a very important conversation that we can have, but we’re not going to have it today, because what we’re going to look at is the subjective denials next.

Looking at the subjective denials, just using that one statute, 2.2 times more blacks are denied over whites based on non-criminal activity. That’s huge. That number right there, should frighten everybody. 

This is in New Jersey, a Democratic stronghold that’s supposed to be “for the people,” just not “these people,” apparently. 

So what did I do? I reached out to the Attorney General. I said [paraphrasing], “Hey, AG, we got a problem. Can I get a comment from you on this denial rate? This is a subjective standard. Why is it being used still? Blacks are being denied at a 2.2 time rate [more than whites] using a subjective standard.” And what did the office say? They declined to comment. Shocking, but they know, and he knew because I sent it again to his email address and to the press office. 

I wanted some more information. They got the information from me, so they know that this is a problem. They must be sending out guidance that would make sense, wouldn’t it? Okay, so I waited a suitable time – the chasm, the delta between when I reached out to the Attorney General the first time and when the OPRA came back, because the OPRA request was seeking more information on any guidance that they sent out said – hey, I want to know [if there was any guidance]. What did they say? “There are no records related to your request.”

The Attorney General sent out zero guidance on dealing with subjective standards, zero guidance on dealing with race in the permit to carry issuance. And I seem to think that that’s a problem. What it makes me do is ask these questions, and what did he say [when asked for comment]? They declined to comment.

When I asked them, are you going to be issuing any guidance? Are you going to be doing this? Again, declined to comment. They can’t say that they don’t know because they’ve been told time and time again – via their data. It’s not my data. I didn’t make it up. It’s his dashboard. 

This is the question that we have to ask. Is the New Jersey, a tenor Attorney General, Matthew Platkin willfully allowing these civil rights violations to occur? And that’s just a question that I want everybody to consider.

What does Governor Phil Murphy have to say about this? I emailed his press people, three of them on three occasions, May 7, May 9 and June 4, and then I sent him a U.S. postal letter with a stamp, couple stamps, because it was a thick letter. That was on June 25, 2024.

Finally. Finally, on August 18, 2024 I had to write an article about him ignoring me. So he never replied. I never heard back from the governor. They don’t care.

But again, is this the question that we need to be asking? Is the New Jersey governor ignoring this? I sure think he is. Can he say that he doesn’t know about it? I don’t think he can.

Where does that leave us today? Today, we’ve had 45,000 plus approved applications for permits to carry. That’s huge, because we basically had zero prior to this. These are numbers per September 11. I wasn’t able to adjust the data with the newest stuff that rolled out. Not too bad, 271 total denials. That gives us a 99.4% approval rate overall. However, 152 of them, more than half, are using an illegal subjective standard. Can’t do that. 

The current race data as of September 11, 2024, we have the information right there. Let’s just cut to the chase. The overall black denial rate is 2.5 times more than the white denial rate. Using a subjective standard, blacks are denied 2.6 times more than whites. That number went up from when I started looking at this data. That number went up from when I informed the attorney general that this is a problem. That’s a big deal. That’s the slide that everybody should be taking a picture of and tweeting at Murphy and the Attorney General. 

We have a parting note. My parting note is this. In July, a press release came out from the Attorney General, and they were talking about systemic racism in the medical field, and he was saying that there’s these underlying biases, okay, they serve as a barrier. And here’s what the health commissioner said, and I want to read this verbatim, the health commissioner said in that press item, “Systemic racism and implicit bias are not myths and have contributed to a long story of racial and ethnic disparities.”

What did I do? Can you guess who I wrote about this? I asked the Attorney General. I said [paraphrasing], “Hey, hey, AG, can I get a comment on why systemic racism is important in medicine, but it’s not important when it comes to issuing firearms permits?” This is what the attorney general’s office of press had to say, “When you reach out to our office with an inquiry, please limit the email to the OAG press account without copying the attorney general.” I’m now living in the attorney general’s head rent free. He doesn’t want to hear from me anymore. [applause]

And then, naturally, par [for] course, the Attorney General had “no comment.”

Okay, thank you guys all very, very much. That QR code will take you to this slide deck. The most important part about the slide deck is at the very end of the slide deck [are] links to all of my work, where you can track this research.

I’m doing tremendous things in New Jersey. There’s a lot of activism going on. The New Jersey NICS Research Center has been tremendous. I’ve been working with them, a new group. And there’s also a couple new 501(c)(4)’s that I’m working with,  [the New Jersey Firearm Owner Syndicate and the Civil Liberties Policy Research Center of New Jersey].

New Jersey is going to be, and continue to be, a battleground on the Second Amendment, and we’re taking them to task. Thank you all very, very much.

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