Over the past four decades, most American states chose to let everyday citizens carry concealed weapons. Indeed, about half of states no longer even require a permit to pack heat.
New York took a different path — but is being dragged into a more lenient gun-carrying regime by the courts. Exactly how far it will be dragged is an open question. But there are two reasons for New Yorkers not to panic.
First, while parts of the state’s strict new law will likely be struck down, New York will retain ample discretion to make permits hard to get — including fees, training requirements and restrictions on where guns may be carried. And second, even in states that liberalized their gun-carrying laws with gusto, the effects on crime are small enough that, despite decades of research, they remain hard to measure reliably.
New York’s legal problem began with the Supreme Court’s Bruen decision earlier this year. The court invalidated the state’s century-old requirement that concealed-carry applicants demonstrate a special need to carry a gun, not just a basic desire for self-defense, as a violation of the right to bear arms.
State legislators responded by replacing this standard with the strictest set of rules they could come up with. Some of the requirements are high but legally sound, such as 18 hours of “live-fire” firearm training.
But others clearly derive from a philosophy of finding the line by crossing it. For example, applicants now must show “good moral character” and provide a list of their social media accounts for inspection. Those who jump through these hoops (and more) are then barred from carrying on the subway, in the Times Square area (the boundaries of which were recently set in a New York City law), and even in private businesses unless the owner has explicitly posted permission.
The legal challenges to these policies will take a while. Under the Supreme Court’s ruling, the state will have to produce “analogous” laws from centuries ago to show that these policies belong to “this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation,” which in turn will entail subjective judgments from courts.
But earlier this month, a federal judge gave a glimpse of what an ultimate ruling might look like, in a temporary restraining order that was quickly appealed. In essence, the judge gave a thumbs-up to the law’s more typical requirements — such as the training demands, requirement for character references, and bans on carrying in government buildings, polling places and churches — and a thumbs-down to the more innovative social-media, Times Square, subway and private-business rules. The good-moral-character rule got something of a thumbs-sideways, with the judge accepting only a weak reading of it.
That would still leave New York with one of the strictest concealed-carry laws in the nation. Most states either require no permit at all, or grant permits based on minimal training that does not even involve firing a gun.
New York won’t have to be as permissive as other states. And other states’ right-to-carry policies have not been the clear disasters that opponents predicted. As I lay out in a new Manhattan Institute report, decades’ worth of research has struggled to measure any impact of these laws on crime.
Effects on the key outcome of homicide remain totally unclear, and while some recent research claims increases in the broader category of overall “violent crime,” this result too is sensitive to statistical modeling choices. Those wanting to dive into the literature might consult the generally fair overview maintained by the Rand Corp., or recent back-and-forth studies from John Donohue et al. and William English.
Importantly, even if one accepts the more dire findings, one would logically expect tighter restrictions to ameliorate them, both by better selecting those allowed to carry guns, and simply by reducing the number of people who carry. Indeed, one recent study found an increase in some types of violent crime, including gun assaults, under right-to-carry — but also found that right-to-carry laws “that prohibited violent misdemeanants [in addition to felons] from obtaining CCW permits were not associated with changes in gun-related violent crime.” That’s a simple and commonsense restriction far lighter than what New York is doing.
New York doesn’t have to love being forced into a right-to-carry policy, but there is also no reason to panic. When the court struggles reach their end, the state will retain plenty of discretion to make legal gun-carrying difficult — even for those with clean records.
VerBruggen is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
