If every great man needs a great cause, then being a pro-freedom individual in New Jersey, which is arguably the least-friendly state in the union for citizens’ Second Amendment-protected rights, presents an opportunity for patriots to stand out.
Enter John Petrolino. You have likely seen his byline at various gun-rights websites. He goes by the moniker “The Pen Patriot,” is also a merchant marine, the author of Decoding Firearms and a poet. (Don’t discount this last attribution, as poetry may grant the necessary mindset to stay sane while navigating New Jersey’s gun laws.)
He is intricately aware of New Jersey’s particular brand of politics. This is important, as Second Amendment advocates can’t completely retreat from any state; after all, if rights are taken away from citizens in some states—and they are and have been—then this potentially creates precedents for these rights to be taken from others by yet more state legislatures and state and federal courts.
A1F: Please give us some perspective on what it is like to be a lawfully armed American who resides in New Jersey.
Petrolino: In the states of New Jersey, Maryland and Hawaii, you functionally had no Second Amendment rights for decades. There are areas in New York where you could get a permit to carry. There are areas in California where you could get your license to carry. In New Jersey, Maryland and Hawaii, it was statewide, near-total lockdown before the NRA-backed case New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022) was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.
So, culturally, in other states it might be like, “Oh yeah, that’s Mr. Bob up the street and he’s got a permit to carry. He’s a cool guy. He just happens to carry a gun, not a big deal.” That has not been the case in New Jersey. It has been very, very different here.
As a result, what you get out of New Jersey are what I’d call insanely strong, aggressive and passionate advocates for this right. This is the case because the state has said “no” for so long. New Jersey has long said, “We’re not respecting your rights. We’re not going to give you your due process.” Some Americans just won’t take that lying down.
I grew up in Middletown. It’s a nice town in central Jersey, not too far away from where New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D) is currently living. I went down to the police station when I was 21 years old and I said, “Hey, I’d like to apply for my permit to carry.”
I was told, “You can’t get a permit to carry in New Jersey.”
I said, “What? What are you talking about? It’s my constitutional right.”
She said, “Not in New Jersey, it’s not.”
I was enraged. So, I said, “Listen, you’ve got paperwork for this. Give me the paperwork. You can’t tell me that I can’t apply.”
She begrudgingly got the fingerprint cards out and the paperwork and handed them to me.
But the point was, she ignited this ember inside of me that has burned for a lot of years. And I think that similar situations to that have happened to other people in the Garden State.
A1F: New Jersey has some rural areas. Didn’t you have some licensing officials who’d obey the U.S. Constitution?
Petrolino: In New Jersey, it is done by the individual municipality. This basically means the chief of police or a state police barracks.
A1F: I see, so it’s not an elected sheriff. It’s somebody whom the governor or another official has installed?
Petrolino: These law-enforcement officials are working at the pleasure of the town council. But that wasn’t the main problem. There were plenty of chiefs of police who would issue a permit to carry if they could. But the application would go from the chief of police to a court, a judge. The judges would then apply the New Jersey statute, which said we needed a “justifiable need,” which was similar to other states’ “good-cause” requirements. That’s where you would get hung up. They’d say you didn’t have justifiable need. And they’d actually treat you like a criminal with a prosecutor advocating against you getting your permit as they did.
That’s been removed from the system thanks to Bruen. This is important for people to know. The NRA backed Bruen from day one. What we got from that is Bruen removed the judges from the equation.
John Petrolino earned the nickname “The Pen Patriot” for his Second Amendment advocacy.
I applied after Bruen and got my concealed-carry permit in 2023. There were restrictions on it. There are still some shenanigans going on here. I couldn’t carry a loaded firearm in a car, for example. So, now you’re sitting there, and you have to unload the firearm, and then you put it in a locked case. But, we had an injunction through the Siegel v. Platkin case, which was our challenge after Bruen, which was also an NRA-backed case. Siegel nullified the restrictions that stopped me from carrying in my car.
Originally, these applications were all paper and had to be notarized. It was crazy. Now it’s online. You first need a firearms ID card; once you have that, you can apply for your permit to carry.
A1F: What does it cost?
Petrolino: For the permit, $50 goes to the state directly, and then $150 goes to the municipality. That’s just for a two-year permit. Beyond that, you need to get mandatory training, which is onerous and expensive. They’re just making it as hard as they possibly can.
A1F: I’m wondering if this is hitting the whole socioeconomic ladder the same? Are there certain groups that are being disenfranchised more than others?
Petrolino: That’s a great question. Last year, the attorney general of New Jersey released a permit-to-carry dashboard [online]. All the statistics were there. They gave us everything. The only thing that I couldn’t find right away were some of the wait times for applicants, so I filed an Open Public Records Act request.
Post-Bruen applications were still taking ridiculously long. It’s supposed to be 90 days with the municipality requesting to get another 90 days. They just take their time, and they do what they do. That was one portion of it. The other portion of it, when I looked at the data, is that I couldn’t find race information. So, I put in another Open Public Records Act request with the state looking for the race data on these permit-to-carry issuances and denials. They got back to me with instructions on how to access it on the dashboard.
So, I got the data, and what I found was that black applicants were getting denied more than twice as much as whites. Basically, we still have a subjective standard in New Jersey. The chief of police or the issuing authority can withhold the issuance of a license if they feel it’s not in the interest of public health, safety and welfare to issue the permit. The real kicker behind all of this is you need to have a firearms ID card before you can apply for your permit to carry. So, you’ve already passed your “good-moral-character” standard if you got your card, but they’re still turning around and saying that certain people can’t get a permit to carry. And they are denying blacks by more than a two-to-one margin over whites.
So, I reached out to the attorney general’s office and they said, “No comment.” Big shocker, right? But about a month after I reported on this denial rate, I filed another Open Public Records Act request with the attorney general’s office. This time, they told me there were no records available.
A1F: The Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division needs to have a file from you on all this stuff.
Petrolino: Yeah, for sure. And I do need to repackage it. I softly sent it to some contacts, but maybe I need to be more aggressive.
A1F: Where can people follow you and find out more about the topics you’re digging into?
Petrolino: You can find me at thepenpatriot.com. There’s also a Pen Patriot Facebook group. And anyone can email me at [email protected].
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