New York City’s Byzantine, Post-Bruen Carry Permit ‘Compliance’ Regime is as Intentionally Unconstitutional As You’d Expect

[O]ur 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.

— Open Source Defense in What’s going on with gun carry in NYC?