In 2024 New Jersey permit-to-carry applicants suffered excessive waits on the issuing of their permits. Since then, how is the Garden State doing on issuing permits in a timely fashion?
How long a permit-to-carry applicant should have to wait is a subjective matter. In this day and age of instant criminal background checks, that wait should be zero. Even in the best jurisdictions in the country there’s usually a few hour wait. The worst offenders will go on for months or even years. From post-Bruen through 2024, approximately 10 percent of applicants had to wait past the statutory limit of 120 days. Looking at 2024 to present, that number dropped to 4.2 percent, but there are still some big issues.
By statute, the issuing authority has 90 days to make a determination on a permit-to-carry application. 2C:58-4.c states that applications shall be “approved or denied by the chief police officer or the superintendent within 90 days of filing,” otherwise “it shall be deemed to have been approved.”
The issuing authority may “for good cause shown and upon written notification to the applicant, extend by up to an additional 30 days the time period for which the application may be approved or denied.” That notification is supposed to supply a reason for the delay to applicants. Further, “An applicant also may agree in writing to an additional extension of time past the 120 day statutory time frame.”
How many applicants who wait more than 90 and/or 120 days receive such notice? How many applicants are granting extensions past 120 days to gross offenders?
Via data obtained through OPRA W258774 we now have a more complete picture on these permit-to-carry statistics. When calculating the numbers provided through the approved records request, we can glean that the average wait time on applications approved between Jan. 1, 2024 and July 31, 2026 is 40.15 days. There were 82,952 total applications during that same timeframe.
Would 40.15 days constitute “lengthy wait times in processing license applications”? Bruen acknowledges such “abusive ends” are ripe for constitutional challenge.
Of those 82,952 applications, 7,151 of them went 90 days or over — 8.62 percent.
Looking at the waits over 90 days, 49.34 percent of those go 120 days or more.
For applications approved between 2024 to present, the oldest application was filed on Aug. 2, 2022. That applicant waited 824 days before getting approved.
The longest wait during this timeframe was a June 30, 2023 applicant who was approved 1,109 days later on July 13, 2026.
There’s no indication of how many — if any — applications were automatically approved due to the issuing authority not moving on the information prior to 90 and/or 120 days respectively.
What’s an unreasonable delay or “lengthy wait time”?
Again, with modern technology, this should be instant. Further, all applicants seeking a New Jersey permit to carry must have first obtained a firearms purchaser identification card. The statutory disqualifiers for a firearms purchaser identification card and permit to carry are identical.
With instant background checks and applicants being pre-vetted via the firearms purchaser identification card application process, seven days is an appropriate limit — if one’s life isn’t on the line, of course. Of the 82,952 applications granted between Jan. 1, 2024 and July 31, 2026, 77,152 or 93.01 percent took seven or more days to issue.
In New Jersey, the entire system is online and the state/issuing authority does not even print the permits to carry. Applicants who are granted permits are emailed an electronic version to print out on their own with limited instructions from the state on how to proceed and/or what’s considered appropriate proof that they’ve been permitted. Some turn to companies to print their cards on durable plastic cards. Others just print them and call it good.
On the surface, it looks like New Jersey is doing “better” than they were two years ago. However, we’re past surface level looks at post-Bruen permits. Anything past a week is an excessive delay in my opinion. With 93 percent of all applicants being caused to wait seven days or more on getting a permit to carry determination, it’s safe to say New Jersey is still within “abusive ends” when it comes to permitting. With modern technology, there’s zero excuse for any significant wait at all.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their extreme gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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