A while back, I wrote about how there's a racial disparity in New Jersey's permitting system. After Bruen killed the requirement for having a good cause to have a permit, the state decided to create a clause that required people to be of "good moral character." This would ostensibly keep bad people who may not be felons from carrying guns lawfully.
It didn't go well as it seems black people are having a much harder time getting permits than whites. Well, it seems the issue is even worse than we originally thought, and this time the evidence is peer-reviewed.
According to a study by Rise Against Hate, the state of New Jersey has a lot to answer for.
For example, across the state, black gun owners are 10.38 times more likely to be denied a carry permit than white applicants. This is after adjustments are made to address the disparity in population sizes.
The authors added, "Additionally, after performing a chi-square test, the data reveals there is a statistically significant relationship between race/ethnicity and application denial percentages."
Moreover, it's worse in some places than others. For example, black applicants in Ocean County are 52.6 times more likely to be denied than white peers while Gloucester and Cumberland Counties show black applicants are 35.98 and 22.2 times more likely to be denied.
And understand that this isn't New Jersey's version of the boonies where this is happening, where their own version of rednecks are just being racist jackwagons. Ocean County has a population of nearly 700,000. Cumberland County has over 150,000. Both of those counties are just outside of Atlantic City, which is in Atlantic County--and which has a disparity rate of 4.87.
Gloucester has 300,000 and is just across the border from Philadelphia, meaning there's at least some cross-pollination happening.
In other words, these are counties at least close enough to urban centers that we're not dealing with hicks, here.
Plus, the racial disparity doesn't just impact black gun owners. In Bergen, Hudson, and Atlantic Counties, the denial rates for Hispanic gun owners were pretty close to blacks.
See, one of the things the Bruen decision tried to do was end subjective criteria for concealed carry permits. Yet these denials weren't because of criminal convictions or some other objective criteria that simply weren't met.
No, these were due to a category called "Public Health, Safety, and Welfare." This is basically where officials can decide if they trust you enough to carry a gun.
“Our findings are not just numbers—they represent real people systematically denied their constitutional rights based on race,” said Benjamin Shore, Executive Director of Rise Against Hate. “Racial bias is embedded within the current permit-to-carry process.”
As someone born and raised in the South, let me just say that I've seen this kind of thing before. It's not new to me at all. It may have predated me by a few years, but this was common enough back in the day.
What happens is that you create some nebulous, subjective standard and then you can decide who gets to exercise the totality of their rights and who doesn't. For years, New Jersey did this with the "good cause" requirement, keeping a lot of people from getting their permits. Now, they have a different standard to do essentially the same thing, and permitting officials seem to be using it in a racist manner.
Now, I'm not one who believes that all disparities are automatically the result of racism, but in a case like this, I can't think of a single reason for this difference that isn't New Jersey officials being as racist as they accuse us in the Deep South of being, and using some of the same kind of language to do it as was used here back in the day to keep black people disarmed...and seemingly for the same reasons.
Pathetic.
