…New Jersey Senate President Nicholas Scutari (D–Linden) and Assembly Speaker Craig Coughlin (D‒Woodbridge Township) have unveiled legislation that closely resembles the [New York] law that [U.S. District Judge Glenn T.] Suddaby deemed constitutionally dubious. Like New York’s law, their bill would impose a subjective standard for carry permits and ban guns from myriad places where people might want to carry them for self-protection.
To obtain a carry permit, an applicant would have to persuade the police that he does not pose a threat to himself or others. Toward that end, he would have to undergo an interview and submit any information that local or state police officials deemed relevant, including “publicly available statements posted or published online by the applicant.”
Suddaby explicitly rejected both of those requirements in New York. And while the threat assessment that Scutari and Coughlin imagine may not be quite as open-ended as New York’s “good moral character” test, it likewise gives licensing authorities wide discretion to reject applications based on subjective judgments, including inferences from opinions an applicant has expressed.
Scutari and Coughlin’s list of gun-free locations is even longer than New York’s, and it includes many restrictions that Suddaby thought the state had failed to justify. In addition to banning guns in specified places, the bill would prohibit them on private property, including homes and businesses, unless the owner expressly allows them and posts a sign to that effect—another rule that Suddaby rejected.
These regulations, Democrats bragged, will make New Jersey “the toughest in the nation when it comes to concealed-carry laws.” Coughlin said “we’re doing this because we know gun safety does not conflict with safe gun ownership.”
— Jacob Sullum in New Jersey Joins New York in Defying the SCOTUS Decision Upholding the Right To Bear Arms
