New Jersey’s carry-permit regime has already raised serious questions about fairness, transparency, and whether politically connected classes get treated differently from ordinary citizens. Now, journalist and AmmoLand contributor John Petrolino is taking that fight into court.
Petrolino has filed suit in New Jersey Superior Court against the New Jersey State Police over repeated denials of records requests seeking data tied to retired law enforcement officer permits to carry handguns. According to the complaint, he requested application records from 2024 and 2025 with personal identifying information stripped out, specifically to examine demographic and outcome data in the retired-officer carry program.
That matters because New Jersey already makes demographic information available for “civilian” permit holders, but according to the complaint, it does not provide a comparable public database for retired officers. Petrolino’s lawsuit argues there is no legitimate basis for releasing demographic information about ordinary permit applicants while blocking similar information about retired law enforcement.
This is exactly the kind of double standard gun owners have come to expect in anti-gun states. When average citizens apply for permits, the state insists the process is neutral and objective. But when someone asks for records that could show whether favored classes receive better treatment, suddenly the curtain drops.
According to the complaint, Petrolino tailored his request to avoid disclosure of personal details, consenting to redactions that would remove names and other identifying information. The point was not to expose private individuals. The point was to determine whether the state is administering a carry-permit program fairly and consistently, especially when it comes to race, geography, disqualifying criteria, and appeals.
As the CCRKBA release notes, the complaint states: “Plaintiff and the public has a strong interest in ascertaining the relationship between the demographics of carry permit holders amongst the general public and retired law enforcement officers including but not limited to county location, race, sex and the effect of potentially disqualifying criteria in the application population as well as the success rate for the appeal process within the New Jersey State Police.”
If New Jersey can publish data on one class of applicants, it should not be able to hide comparable information for another class of people simply because the second class wore a badge.
The lawsuit says the State Police denied the request under New Jersey Administrative Code 13:54-1.15, which the agency says makes firearms permit applications and records reflecting issuance or denial confidential. But Petrolino’s complaint pushes back on that reading and also argues the state failed to properly handle the records denial under OPRA procedures. The suit further claims he is entitled to the records under New Jersey’s common-law right of access and alleges a violation of the New Jersey Civil Rights Act.
The complaint argues that court intervention is warranted to force production of the records and potentially award counsel fees. In the filing’s words, “Having established Petrolino was deprived of his common law right of access the New Jersey Civil Rights Act was violated, the clear remedy is injunctive relief compelling the production of the records to Petrolino…”
CCRKBA, while not a party to the case, is publicly backing Petrolino. The organization’s release says he had previously reported that Black New Jersey permit-to-carry applicants were denied at more than double the rate of white applicants for non-criminal or subjective reasons, and that he sought retired-officer permit statistics to continue digging into the issue.
Petrolino did not mince words in the CCRKBA release, stating: “The NJSP has denied countless records requests that I’ve made over the years, never fulfilling even one. When I emailed them about these denials, an unnamed person at NJSP basically told me to sue them — so here we are.”
That quote says a lot about the broader climate in New Jersey. The state has spent years treating the right to bear arms as something to be rationed, delayed, managed, and discouraged. A government that is confident in the fairness of its permitting system should not be terrified of anonymized demographic data.
Alan Gottlieb drove that point home in the same release, saying, “Records concerning the retired police officer permits are about as public as you can get. Do they have the same level of perceived bias in their permitting statistics? Or perhaps worse yet, do they not? The public has a right to know this information.”
For gun owners, this case goes beyond one journalist and one records request. It goes to a bigger problem that repeatedly shows up in hostile jurisdictions: one set of rules for insiders, another for everybody else. Retired law enforcement officers may well have lawful pathways to carry under state and federal law, but that does not mean the administration of those permits should be immune from scrutiny. If New Jersey is applying different standards to carry permits, the public deserves to see it. If not, the state should have nothing to fear from disclosure.
The suit, captioned John Petrolino v. New Jersey State Police, & Trooper “X”, was filed in Mercer County on February 27, 2026, as an OPRA summary action. At this stage, the allegations in the complaint remain allegations, and the court has not ruled on the merits. But the case is shaping up as a direct test of whether New Jersey can hide permit data when that data might reveal uncomfortable truths about how the state treats armed citizens versus retired government insiders.
For a state that claims to value transparency and equal treatment, the answer should be simple. If the government is going to regulate a constitutional right, it should not get to keep the public in the dark about how that power is being used.
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