OSD 349: What’s going on with gun carry in NYC?
What it’s like to apply for a carry permit in the Big Apple.
It has been three and a half years since the Supreme Court struck down may-issue carry permit regimes in NYSRPA v. Bruen. How are things going in New York City, which ran the final boss of may-issue regimes?
One hint is that the NYPD has stopped releasing statistics on how many permits it approves. Back in 2023, local outlet The City reported:
The NYPD approved fewer new licenses to people requesting permits to carry or keep firearms in their homes or businesses in 2022 than the year prior, data obtained by THE CITY shows — despite the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that found a key provision of the state’s long-standing gun control law violated the Second Amendment right to bear arms.
In 2021, the NYPD — which vets firearm permits — received 4,663 applications and approved 2,591 of them, about 56%, all under the stricter “proper cause” standard the Supreme Court struck down last year. That standard required gun owners in New York to show “proper cause” in order to receive a permit to carry a weapon, but the court said licenses should be granted by default unless there was a specific reason to deny an applicant.
In 2022, the NYPD saw an increased number of new applications — 7,260 — but approved just 1,550, or 21%, even though applications filed in the second half of that year no longer had to meet the “proper cause” standard where applicants had to make an affirmative case for why they needed a license.
So counterintuitively, throughput went down immediately after Bruen. That’s both in absolute numbers and as a percentage of applications.
In March 2024, Gothamist reported on more recent permit application numbers:
The number of New Yorkers petitioning to arm themselves with guns — both at home and on the streets — more than doubled [in 2023], according to new data on NYPD license and permit applications obtained by Gothamist.
But the NYPD will not say how many gun license and concealed carry permit applications it has approved, even as the department faces a class-action lawsuit claiming it takes too long to review applications.
The surging number of applications follows a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 2022 that found New York’s gun licensing regime was too strict. [In 2023], the NYPD License Division received 13,369 to possess a handgun or rifle at home. That’s 80% more applications for home licenses than the department got in 2022, and nearly triple the applications it got in 2019.
The increase was even starker for concealed carry applications, which jumped from 258 in 2019 to 6,751 last year, according to NYPD data.
The number of concealed carry applications in the first two months of [2024] has already surpassed the total for 2019, 2020 and 2021 combined.
And our final useful data comes from Milani et al v. New York City (PDF), a federal lawsuit from a group of New York gun owners arguing that NYC’s permitting process remains unconstitutionally burdensome.
New York law requires applications to be either approved (with permit issued) or disapproved within six months of a complete application being filed. The lawsuit details how NYC gets around that:
Submit your application, wait months for a fingerprinting appointment.
When you get your fingerprinting appointment, you’re also sent a list of extra application requirements that the NYPD doesn’t disclose at the beginning of the process. Specifically that is your Social Security card, lifetime DMV abstract, character reference letters, and a questionnaire. This allows them to say that you still haven’t completed your application, months after you sent it in.
After your fingerprinting appointment, wait months for an investigator (read: a paperwork processor) to be assigned to your application.
After they are assigned, wait months for them to verify that you’ve submitted all the required documents. They will then approve your application.
But you’re not done. After approval, they send you a Notice of Application Approval. The law used to say that that would be sent via email. Instead, the NYPD ignored the law and took 6-8 weeks to send it via physical mail. After pushback, they did the sensible thing and … had the law changed to allow them to continue mailing the notices via USPS.
With your Notice of Application Approval in hand, you can arrange with an FFL to buy a handgun. But you can’t yet take it home. You have to register it with the NYPD (by sending them photos of the gun and its make/model/serial number details, as well as photos of the interior and exterior of your home safe), whereupon they will print your physical license card, write the make and model of your gun on it, and mail the license to your house. That takes another couple months. There are farcical examples of the NYPD writing the wrong model on people’s license and then taking months to correct the problem, with the gun waiting at the FFL all the while.
Upon receiving the license, you can take the gun home from the FFL. That requires a second NICS check, because the NYPD also required a NICS check back at the time of registration, and NICS checks are only good for 30 days. It’s the norm for more than 30 days to elapse between when a buyer registers their handgun and when the NYPD gets around to issuing the license to take it home.
The lawsuit argues that in violation of both New York law the Second Amendment, wait times for handgun permits (even basic possession permits, let alone carry permits) are commonly 1-2 years. Even NYC’s long gun permits, which are a simpler process (albeit far more complicated than those of any other US jurisdiction), almost always take an illegally long time to be issued. From page 48 of the lawsuit:
Despite the City’s statutory mandate to issue Rifle/Shotgun Permits to approved applicants within 30 days from the date the application was submitted, or at the very least, within 60 days, of the countless approved applications for Rifle/Shotgun Permits which are known to Plaintiffs, just two of those permits were issued within three-and-a-half months, and another permit was issued within approximately four months. The rest were not issued until five, six, or even 12 or more months after the applications were first submitted.
After all that, it’s natural that the NYPD has stopped releasing statistics on permit approvals. The data would be devastating for their defense in the lawsuits they’re facing.
This week’s links
“Making sense of Canada’s unique gun culture”
Interview highlighting the differences between the gun cultures north and south of the 49th parallel.
World champion shotgun shooter vs. FPV drones
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And then they have the nerve to complain about people buying/carrying illegally! Between a year plus of waiting and ~$500 in fees and class costs they're likely driving a lot of people who'd pass NICS underground just for posturing
Nice to see you highlighting Noah Schwartz's work. His book about American gun culture is also excellent: https://amzn.to/47zEuLL