What New Jersey Gun Owners May Have to Deal With Next

New Jersey is among the most anti-gun states in the nation, and it only seems to be getting worse. While there have been a few hints at attitudes changing in the Garden State, it’s clearly not enough to dissuade anti-gunners there from finding new and troubling ways to infringe upon the right to keep and bear arms.

Now, it seems that the effort is one that will have a longer-lasting impact than most other regulations might.

After all, you might be grandfathered in on some restrictions. A tax on ammunition or a massive increase in the cost of a permit, though? There’s no way to get grandfathered on that.

If you’re a gun owner in New Jersey, you might want to stock up on ammunition now—Governor Phil Murphy’s latest budget proposal is taking aim at your wallet once again. Tucked into his $58.1 billion spending plan for fiscal year 2026, unveiled last month, is a nearly $8 million revenue grab through increased firearm fees and new excise taxes on both guns and ammo. Details are still hazy, but if history is any guide, the hikes could hit hard.

Murphy’s no stranger to pushing these measures. In past years, he’s tried—and failed—to jack up fees like the firearms purchaser identification card from $5 to $100 and the handgun carry permit from $50 to $400, while also floating a 2.5% tax on firearm sales and a 10% tax on ammunition. His 2019 pitch, which included a $3.2 million ammo tax haul, got shot down by lawmakers, but he’s back at it, banking on $7.8 million this time around. The administration’s keeping mum on specifics for now, but the intent is clear: make owning and using a gun more expensive.

These aren’t small increases. This is a significant jump and one that’s really predicated on absolutely nothing but making it more expensive to lawfully own a firearm. That’s it.

Let’s remember that guns aren’t exactly cheap. Even a low-cost, cheap handgun can be around $150 or so, the last time I checked. Couple that with a $100 permit so you can lawfully buy one, plus a 2.5 percent tax on the gun itself, followed by the 10 percent tax on ammo so you can actually use it, and the costs build up pretty quickly.

And if you’re intending to carry that gun, then suddenly you’re hit with another $400 expense right from the jump.

This is before you take the required training course to get that carry permit.

In other words, they’re trying to make it just too expensive to carry a firearm lawfully for many law-abiding folks in the state. They’re also trying to make it too expensive for many of those same people to even own a firearm, much less train with it.

I always find the taxes on ammo funny, in part because one of the arguments against concealed carry is that we’re not as well trained as the police, but they then try to make it too expensive for us to train more.

It’s ridiculous.

Then again, this is New Jersey. This is par for the course there.

Now, the 2019 effort went down in flames, so there’s a chance this one will, too. We can hope.