The Bruen decision was directly focused on New York City and how they routinely prohibited people from exercising their right to keep and bear arms.The “may issue” permitting scheme existed explicitly to deny people the ability to carry a firearm, which lawmakers there view as a privilege versus a right.
So, the Supreme Court stepped in and lowered the boom. The ruling has been criticized by anti-gunners as undermining decades of gun control laws, as if that wasn’t the point.
In New York City, today, they have National Guard troops on subway platforms–gun-free zones, it should be noted–and it seems officials there are still up to their old tricks.
The number of New Yorkers petitioning to arm themselves with guns — both at home and on the streets — more than doubled last year, 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. Last year, 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 this year has already surpassed the total for 2019, 2020 and 2021 combined.
The NYPD did not respond to multiple requests for data on the number of applications the department has approved since 2019.
That is more than a little troubling.
The reason is that the NYPD hasn’t always been mum on the number of permits they’ve approved. This is from a different story published in July 2023:
In 2021, according to the data, the NYPD approved 352 of 1,841 applications for permits to keep guns in a person’s home, or over 19%. In 2022, that approval rate plummeted, with the NYPD approving just 86 of 2,266 new residence permit applications submitted, or under 4%, though that approval rate may shift as the NYPD reviews additional applications.
Now, the Bruen decision came down in June of 2022, which means that it wasn’t in effect for about half the year. Immediately post-Bruen, though, no law in place would allow the NYPD to deny a permit, so I’m not sure how that could have been the case, yet here we are.
Yet they still answered the question.
If they’re not answering it now, that’s alarming because it seems unlikely that the acceptance rate is now somehow particularly high. Instead, I fully expect it to be even lower than this four percent.
It’s just that now, so many more people are applying that it just seems higher.
The issue, however, is that unless the number is something like 90 percent, we’ve got a problem. It means people are still being denied a permit for no legitimate reason. That’s likely why the NYPD is being silent.
If people know how few are being approved for carry permits, even as armed soldiers patrol subway platforms, then lawsuits won’t be far behind.
