This Is What (Still) Happens In A ‘May-Issue’ Permitting State

You may remember that last year, the Supreme Court handed down a ruling in New York State Rifle & Pisol Association v. Bruen. It made all the papers at the time. The Court invalidated New York’s “good cause” requirement that kept hundreds of thousands of Empire Staters from lawfully carrying a firearm (unless, of course, they were celebrity, well-connected, or paid a fixer to walk their application through the Byzantine approval process).

Anyone who thought states like New York, New Jersey, California and a few others would take the high court’s ruling lying down and begin issuing permits to all who apply probably also believe Jeffrey Epstein was suicidal.

Rather than requiring applicants to show good cause why issuing authorities should deign to grant their request to not only keep but also bear arms, they enacted a range of Bruen response laws, designating huge swaths of their states as no-go zones for to those who do manage to get permits.

And to keep the number of permits to a minimum, New York scrapped its “good cause” language and enacted instead a requirement that carry permit applicants show “good moral character.” In practice, that gives state officials virtually the same kind of subjective discretion over who can and can’t get a carry permit as they had before Bruen was handed down. New York still largely remains a “may issue” jurisdiction.

Most of these states are facing court challenges to the Bruen response laws they’ve enacted, but in the mean time, what does that kind of discretion mean in practice? Watch the video above that describes what one New Yorker has gone through and why a legitimate defensive gun use a decade ago is allegedly keeping him from getting a permit to carry today.

And so it goes.

P.S. If you’re interested, here’s our post from 2012 on the little mishap Judge Vincent Sgueglia had in the Tioga County courthouse (mentioned in the video above).