According to the Brady Scorecard on Gun Laws state-by-state, New Jersey is ranked #2 in the nation and #1 in the Northeast, with a score totaling 63 out of a possible 100 points. Nationwide we’re second only to California.
 
And now you’re asking yourself, “OK, what’s a Brady Scorecard on Gun Laws?”
 
Let’s find out.

The Brady Campaign Scorecard evaluates each state’s gun laws according to how well they meet certain criteria that they believe “will curb gun violence and illegal gun trafficking”. It’s hard for us to imagine how legislation can alter the behavior of violent criminals or how additional laws will stop what is already “illegal gun trafficking”, but if Brady’s numbers are correct, New Jersey should have the lowest crime rates in the region, if not the entire USA.
  
So we decided to take an analytical look at New Jersey’s score on the Brady Scorecard of State Gun Control Laws and its correlation to crime in New Jersey.
 
According to the Brady Campaign’s national press release:

The Brady Scorecards are designed so that states can score up to 100 points across five major categories of laws: Curbing Firearm Trafficking; Strengthening Brady Background Checks; Child Safety; Banning Military-style Assault Weapons; and making it harder to carry Guns In Public Places.

However, many of these laws have been extensively studied and show no significant impact on crime after their implementation. For example, John Lott evaluated the Brady background check in his book, More Guns, Less Crime, and found no statistical evidence that it reduced crime.  In fact, as more states have removed restrictive laws and allowed their citizens the right to carry, violent crime has dropped, as we shall see later.

On the Brady Campaign’s website, they state that:

Two-thirds of all states score less than 20 points out of 100. Almost half of all states score 10 points or less out of 100. The state with the strongest gun laws is California with 79 points, followed by New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Maryland.

Widely acknowledged as the key measure of crime throughout the United States, the FBI Uniform Crime Report details the frequency, type, and geographical distribution of violent crimes across the US. The FBI describes it as follows:

The Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program was conceived in 1929 by the International Association of Chiefs of Police to meet a need for reliable, uniform crime statistics for the nation. In 1930, the FBI was tasked with collecting, publishing, and archiving those statistics. Today, several annual statistical publications, such as the comprehensive Crime in the United States, are produced from data provided by nearly 17,000 law enforcement agencies across the United States.

So what happens when we put the Brady Campaign’s scores against the FBI Uniform Crime Reports?  Something very interesting. 

TABLE 1 - BRADY SCORES AND VIOLENT CRIME RATES FOR NORTHEASTERN STATES

What we found was that as the Brady Score decreases, so does the violent crime rate. This is exactly opposite of what the Brady Campaign espouses - that tighter gun laws will reduce crime.

Right-to-carry laws have been studied extensively across the country as more states have adopted them. States that mandate issue of concealed weapon permits to anyone meeting key requirements are called shall-issue states. These shall-issue states are now quite plentiful, but NJ is still not one of them. One axiom in data analysis is to always evaluate in the largest context possible as well as the detailed contexts. Since the Brady Campaign Scores every state in the USA, let’s look at the entire USA with respect to changes in right-to-carry laws and violent crime rates both now and 20 years ago.

Wikipedia's entry on Concealed Carry in the United States says:

In 39 concealed-carry states, issuing officials may not arbitrarily deny a concealed-carry application, a practice known as Florida-style "shall issue", even though this practice had been adopted in Washington state in 1961. Nine states have "may issue" laws requiring the applicant to demonstrate specific "need." In practice, this is often a mechanism to deny licensing.

These "may issue" states range from "shall issue" in practice, such as Alabama and Connecticut; to "at the whim of local officials", such as New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and California, (where rural officials liberally issue permits but urban officials seldom do) to "almost non-issue" in states such as Maryland; to "never-issue" Hawaii where, though state law allows for the issuance of permits, officials choose not to issue them under any circumstances.*

*Wikipedia's links and citations have been removed

The two charts above detail an historical snapshot of the ability of private citizens to carry a concealed firearm. Red states (Illinois & Wisconsin) are no-issue, meaning they do not license or issue carry-concealed-weapons (CCW) permits to private citizens. Yellow states are may-issue, which means local jurisdictions approve of or may deny and usually rarely approve of CCW permits (NJ, NY, MD, MA). Blue indicates shall-issue CCW permit states. Finally, green states (Alaska and Vermont) have no restrictions on carrying weapons by their residents.

If the Brady Campaign's warnings of "the dangers of handguns in public places" are correct, crime should have increased overall in the last twenty years across the United States. Quite the opposite is true. What follows in the table below is a snapshot of total crime and violent crime for the same two years illustrated above.

So a key take-away here is that increased Right-to-Carry laws nationwide correlate with both lower Crime Rates and lower Violent Crime Rates nationwide. This should be a good indication to the reader that citizens with concealed weapon permits very likely reduce crime, and that violent criminals are deterred by an armed populace. (Further information and very detailed analysis may be found in John Lott’s book, More Guns, Less Crime.)

So, in conclusion, New Jersey should have one of the lowest crime rates in the USA, or at least the lowest in the Northeast, according to the Brady Scorecard.  Yet in the Northeast, New Jersey ranks near the top in violent crime rate for the 8 states in our region. So do more Gun Control Laws actually reduce crime? From Table 1 and the graph it would appear that in the Northeast more gun control laws increase crime rates. We have in New Jersey the second most restrictive set of State laws on Gun Control in the United States of America. It appears that these restrictions only keep the innocent majority unarmed in the face of violent criminals, and violent criminals take advantage of the situation.

Author's notes:

Two further points need to be made here. The first one is in regard to Washington, DC. It is of interest to note that the District of Columbia (DC) did not receive a numerical Brady Score. If it did, it would have a very high if not the highest score since it has a total ban on handguns. It currently receives only a letter grade of B-, which is a score of 80 according to most educational institutions. With a violent crime rate of 1508, nearly five times that of NJ, and a high equivalent Brady Score of 80, it clearly illustrates that more gun control equals more violent crime.
 
Secondly, Pennsylvania is normally included in groups of the Northeastern States. Its exclusion here is deliberate. Since it is a border state of the Northeast and the Mid-Atlantic States, the author believes it belongs with the Mid-Atlantic States due to its lower population density than the Northeastern States.

The mission of the Brady Campaign to reduce “gun violence” seems at first glance to be a good one, but it is misguided, as reduction of all violence should be the focus. A person murdered with an axe is just as big a loss to their family and to society as a person who is shot. The author also disagrees with the Brady group on the means and methods to reduce violence.  The focus has to be on the criminals that commit the violence, and not on more firearm laws which only serve to encumber law abiding citizens and trample on their Second Amendment rights. Since criminals number a small percentage of the entire US population, the actions to be taken must not apply to the entire population, but rather to the criminal subgroup element within the population.  The author believes the money and efforts of the Brady Campaign should be devoted to prevention and deterrents of criminal activity, reduction of the environments that breed criminals and changing any system that rewards criminal behavior. Reducing crime is about the criminals, not the guns or weapons they choose, which can be tools of both aggression and defense.
 
New Jersey and a large part of the Northeast therefore do not appear progressive, but rather regressive in adoption of laws that the rest of the United States of America has already decided are beneficial to the well being of their state populations. We at NJCSD believe self defense of your person, your home and your family to be a Second Amendment-protected inalienable right, not something a local jurisdiction awards or grants according to one’s judicial or political influence.