Why is it Ten Times Harder to Get a Gun Permit in New Jersey If You’re Black?

The suspicion that race is factored into applications that Fanny described 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.

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. “I think they did this on purpose. It makes no sense to do it this way. But they strategically pulled out different portions of race and other things that would show disparities,” he said. “If a data scientist is working on that, they would not have pulled that out.”

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.

He compared those numbers to racial disparity cases involving marijuana enforcement. But even those cases, he said, paled in comparison. “Those numbers were usually like, they’re three times more likely, five times more likely. And that was enough to find discrimination,” Shore said. “Here we’re talking about numbers that are 10 times more likely, across the state, to be denied a permit.”

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. “They get approved for it. And then when they apply for the permit to carry with the same exact qualifications as their initial ID card, they’re getting denied if they’re Black. If they’re white, they’re not, because it’s up to the police officer’s discretion. Why is it that the same qualifications applied, but Black people are being denied at extremely high rates?”

“Your constitutional right varies by your ZIP code in New Jersey,” he said.

That stayed with me, because it matched what I had heard from Fanny in Paterson, and what a man from Woodland Park casually told her at a gun store when he said his approval came in two weeks. Shore said he knew of applicants who were denied in one part of New Jersey and approved after moving elsewhere, with no meaningful change in their background. “If you did move, and you moved to another county in New Jersey,” he told me, “you will 100 percent have your right.”

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.

— Aymann Ismail in Long Shot