The NYPD is touting its latest crime statistics, including a continued decline in shootings and the seizure of more than 4,500 illegal firearms so far this year. Unfortunately, the NYPD is far less successful when it comes to ensuring that law-abiding residents can exercise their Second Amendment rights in a timely manner.
While police officials are patting themselves on the back for their crime-fighting efforts, New Yorkers who want to legally carry a firearm for self-defense are reportedly waiting as long as 18 months for the NYPD to process their applications. State law generally gives licensing authorities six months to make a decision, but that deadline apparently means little to the department. The NYPD may be eager to publicize how many guns it's taking off the streets, but it seems considerably less concerned about how long it's taking ordinary citizens to legally carry one.
AmmoLand investigation has found that the NYPD is holding up some pistol permits in New York City for 12 to 18 months. If you read Roger J. Katz’s October 26 piece at AmmoLand, “NYPD Exposed for Illegal Delays in Firearms Licensing,” you already know the outline of this problem. Since then, what we have uncovered is how long some people are actually waiting for a pistol permit, and it’s a lot longer than the law allows.
Penal Law § 400.00(4-b) says the licensing officer “shall act upon any application for a license pursuant to this section within six months of the date of presentment.” There’s a narrow exception. The officer can go past six months only “upon written notice to the applicant specifically stating the reasons for any delay,” and the statute says that delay “may only be for good cause and with respect to the applicant.” When the officer finally acts, he must either deny the application “for reasons specifically and concisely stated in writing” or grant it and issue the license.
Six months. The state wrote that number itself. Pistol permit wait times are double or triple that.
While the NYPD is eager to tout the number of "illegal" guns it's confiscated this year, good luck getting anyone in the department to reveal how many carry permits have been issued since January 1.
Last November, The City Reporter claimed that more than 17,000 carry permits had been approved since the Bruen decision in June 2022, with another 8,000 applications waiting to be resolved. That averages out to about 5,100 per year. If that same pace has continued this year, then the number of permits issued might finally have outpaced the number of guns confiscated by the department.
We don't know if that's actually the case, though, because the NYPD hasn't said how many permits have been approved this year. I've emailed the Office of the Deputy Commissioner, Public Information multiple times since July of last year asking for the number of permits that have been approved, and I've never received a reply at all, not even a "we're not saying." I sent another email on Friday, but I suspect that too will go unanswered.
This isn't just a public relations problem for the NYPD. It's a civil rights issue, and one that the department has apparently decided it can ignore with impunity. New Yorkers are trying to exercise a constitutionally protected right, and the NYPD has no business treating those applications as paperwork it can get around to whenever it feels like it.
The lack of transparency is just as infuriating. If the department can provide detailed statistics on gun seizures, shootings, and arrests, it can certainly tell the public how many carry permits it's approved. The fact that it won't even respond to straightforward questions about those numbers raises serious questions about what the NYPD doesn't want New Yorkers to know.
I know the Department of Justice has been very busy in California as of late, but I really hope they turn their attention to the abuses at the NYPD here before long. The Supreme Court struck down New York's arbitrary restrictions on concealed carry more than four years ago, but the NYPD seems determined to preserve as much of the old system as possible through bureaucratic obstruction. A right delayed is a right denied, and a police department that refuses to account for those delays shouldn't be celebrating taking guns off the street when it's unfairly depriving so many people of their right to legally carry one.
