The nation loves guns a lot more than New Jersey does

Dave Sheingold | NorthJersey

Show Caption Hide Caption Legal questions surround printed 3D guns A federal judge issued a temporary restraining order, stopping a Texas businessman from posting his blueprints for 3D printed guns online. Cody Wilson had just resumed posting his blueprints after a 5-year battle with the US government. (Aug. 2)

Americans like guns. New Jerseyans? Not as much.

Federal data analyzed by The Record and NorthJersey.com reveals that while firearm purchases are up, New Jersey consistently ranks dead last, or next to last, every year in the rate of residents seeking to own firearms.

The data, covering background checks on prospective buyers, shows that roughly five times as many people apply to purchase a gun, rifle or shotgun around the country than in New Jersey.

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Only Hawaiians had a smaller percentage of background checks run on them from 2015 through 2017. Prior to that, the lowest rate belonged to New Jersey, which has some of strictest gun-control laws in the country.

That’s not to say lots of people in the state aren’t applying to buy lots of guns. In 2017, for example, 103,739 background checks were run on New Jersey residents, according to the FBI.

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But that number translated into a mere 115 checks per 10,000 residents — a figure dwarfed by the national rate of 632 per 10,000. In some states, like Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota and West Virginia, the rate topped 1,000.

While background checks do not measure the actual number of sales, they are the best gauge because states are not required to report the number of purchases.

Amid New Jersey’s relative lack of interest in guns, the state’s trends have roughly followed the direction of the country as a whole, spiking in the late 2000s and early 2010s before leveling off and even dropping in 2017.

The state averaged about 39,000 checks from 2000 to 2007, before rising annually to 120,071 in 2013. Last year’s number was down 8.6 percent from 2016.

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