New York is technically a “shall issue” state now, post-Bruen (the June 2022 Supreme Court decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen recognizing a constitutional right to carry a handgun outside the home for self-defense). On paper, the Supreme Court forced the state’s hand. In practice, New York found a new way to make the right to self-defense functionally unreachable for most people. To get a carry license, an applicant has to complete 16 hours of classroom instruction, plus two hours of live-fire training, submit four character references, sit for an in-person interview, and pass a background process that, in my experience, takes an average of six months — and commonly can stretch past a year.
An attorney once put it to me this way, and I haven’t heard it said better: if New York actually cared about safety, the ratio would be flipped — sixteen hours of live-fire and safe-handling training, two hours of legal seminar. Instead, it’s the opposite. The overwhelming majority of mandated time isn’t spent teaching people to operate a firearm safely. It’s spent walking them through everything they’re not allowed to do. That’s not a safety program. That’s a liability shield with a permit slip attached. And that’s before you factor in the cost — training, fingerprinting, application fees, lost work hours — which adds up to something far beyond a minor inconvenience. For someone working full-time or living on a tight income, six months to a year of cost and paperwork isn’t a deterrent. It’s often a hard stop.
Even after someone clears every hurdle and gets approved, New York’s list of “sensitive locations” strips the license of most of its value. Subways. Times Square. Public transit. The exact places where violent crime is most concentrated and where the value of self-defense is most needed are off limits. The state hands you a license in one hand and takes back the protection with the other. To be clear, I don’t think every requirement is worthless. A seminar on the legal use of force has real value. Live-fire training has real value. The problem isn’t that New York asks people to be trained and responsible. The problem is how it’s built — layered, slow, and expensive in a way that has far more to do with discouraging applicants than preparing them.
— Raziel Cohen and Yehuda Remer in New York Doesn’t Want You Armed, The Bureaucracy Proves It