DOJ Treats a N.J. Town’s Gun-Permit Slow-Walk as a Civil Rights Case

Written By TNT Staff, Posted on October 17, 2026

Featured photo: The Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building, Washington, D.C. Photo: Voice of America (public domain, via Wikimedia Commons).

For years, gun owners in blue states have been told that a permit delay is just paperwork. The Justice Department now says it may be a civil rights violation.

On Wednesday, the Civil Rights Division opened an investigation into whether Pennsauken Township, a Camden County, New Jersey, community, “deprives citizens of their right to bear arms through egregious and unjust delays in issuing firearm licenses.” The probe targets the Pennsauken Township Police Department’s permitting system.

“I have directed the Civil Rights Division, through our Second Amendment Section, to defend law-abiding citizens from local authorities who infringe on the right to safely carry legal firearms,” said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon. “Our investigation aims to discover if allegations of unconstitutional delays in firearm permitting are true, and if so, to fix it.”

This is an investigation, not a finding. DOJ has not said Pennsauken broke the law, and the township has not been charged or sued. But the department’s language is blunt: “It is a violation of the Second Amendment for government officials to delay issuing permits to purchase or carry firearms.”

The law says 30 days

In New Jersey, you cannot legally buy a handgun without a Permit to Purchase, and those permits are issued by your local police chief. State law is clear about timing. Under N.J.S.A. 2C:58-3(f), the licensing authority “shall grant the permit… within 30 days from the date of receipt of the application for residents of this State,” unless there is good cause to deny it.

According to the township, the full process typically takes four to six weeks if no issues come up, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. That is already past 30 days at the long end. Residents allege far worse. Bearing Arms reported that the township has been accused of taking 90 days or more on permit applications.

The most detailed allegation is in court records. In a federal complaint filed June 18, 2024, Pennsauken resident Christian Benton, joined by the Coalition of New Jersey Firearm Owners, Gun Owners of America and the Gun Owners Foundation, said he applied for two handgun permits on Feb. 27, 2024. When he sued 112 days later, he still had neither, according to the complaint, which says New Jersey law “clearly requires the issuance of those permits within 30 days.”

Benton’s case shows why a federal investigation matters. In 2025, U.S. District Judge Karen Williams dismissed the delay claims, citing a “lack of constitutional injury” because Benton and the others had since received their permits, the Inquirer reported. “They are all, as this Court can glean from what is before it, currently exercising their Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms,” she wrote. The rest of the suit, a challenge to New Jersey’s one-handgun-a-month limit, is still going.

That’s a trap gun owners know well. Wait long enough and the permit eventually arrives, and then the court says there’s no harm left to fix. The delay itself becomes the policy, and no one is ever held to account for it. A pattern-or-practice investigation by the federal government looks at the system, not one applicant.

Stephen D. Stamboulieh, one of Benton’s original lawyers, now works in the Civil Rights Division’s Second Amendment Section, Bearing Arms reported. Court records show he was admitted to appear in the Benton case in August 2024.

Bruen said this out loud

DOJ is leaning on the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, which struck down New York’s “proper cause” rule for carry permits. In a footnote, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the majority that “because any permitting scheme can be put toward abusive ends, we do not rule out constitutional challenges to shall-issue regimes where, for example, lengthy wait times in processing license applications or exorbitant fees deny ordinary citizens their right to public carry.”

Four years later, the federal government is finally acting on that warning. DOJ says it is alleged that Pennsauken uses “just such ‘abusive ends’ to improperly limit Second Amendment rights.”

Think about any other right. If a town clerk took four months to process a permit for a church service or a protest, no one would call it paperwork. They would call it suppression, and the Civil Rights Division would be right to step in. The Second Amendment is in the same Bill of Rights. Slow-walking a permit to buy a gun is infringement by delay.

Part of a pattern

Pennsauken is the latest target for the Second Amendment Section, which DOJ says “investigates alleged patterns or practices of Second Amendment infringement by law enforcement.”

On Sept. 16, DOJ sued San Jose, California, over its concealed-carry application fee of nearly $1,600, which the department calls the highest in the nation. “You don’t need a law degree to recognize that charging a fee several times higher than the cost of the firearm itself is illogical,” Dhillon said.

On Sept. 24, DOJ sued Minnesota, Minneapolis and St. Paul over the state’s permit-to-purchase rules and 30-day waiting period, saying some residents of the two cities wait nearly 60 days. “When a person needs to defend their home, they need to defend it now, not thirty to sixty days from now,” Dhillon said.

These are the two problems Bruen named: fees that price people out, and waits that wear them down. DOJ is going after both.

What happens next

Pennsauken and DOJ both declined to comment to the Inquirer, citing the investigation.

Pennsauken deserves its day to answer. Staffing and backlogs are real problems for small departments. But the Constitution doesn’t come with an exception for understaffing, and New Jersey’s own law sets the clock at 30 days. If a town can’t meet it, the answer is to fix the office, not make citizens wait.

DOJ is asking anyone who believes their right to keep and bear arms has been infringed to file a complaint at justice.gov/crt/second-amendment-section.