New Jersey Concealed Carry Permits Hit Record High in January

This is a direct result of the Bruen Supreme Court decision. From The New Jersey Monitor: Requests for gun carry permits hit record highs in January

The New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen decision stated that New York had to eliminate the need to citizens to show a "need" to carry a handgun. In other words they had to ask politely if they could exercise their rights. Most of the time they were told no. SCOTUS threw out that requirement.

New Jersey had a similar law, and that also had to be changed.

Authorities processed 4,282 applications for carry permits in January, the highest number on record, just months after exceeding 3,000 approved applications for the first time in October, according to data maintained by the state attorney general.

In the two years before the Supreme Court ruling, the highest number of these applications in a given month was 102.

New Jersey has processed 61,751 applications for a concealed carry license between June 2022, when the ruling was handed down, and January. In the two and a half years prior to Bruen, there were about 1500 license applications made in the state.

New Jersey, trying to make life as hard as possible, only issues concealed carry licenses for 2 years, and some of those 61,000 licenses have expired.

And as per usual, the anti-gun politicians predicted mayhem would be the result.

Democratic officials predicted that expanded access to firearms and carry permits would increase gun crime in the state — Murphy called Bruen’s expansion of access to carry permits a “recipe for tragedy” shortly after the Supreme Court issued the ruling — but gun crime has fallen since then.

Murphy in January announced the number of New Jersey shooting victims in 2024 fell to the lowest level recorded since the state began tallying those statistics in 2009, declining for the second consecutive year to 778 victims, including 152 fatalities.

Because when seconds count, police are only minutes away, and while criminals are not the smartest group around, even they can understand that armed citizens mean they might end up injured or dead.