Key Takeaways
- The Second Circuit ruled Tuesday that a federal judge was wrong to dismiss challenges to three New York City gun rules.
- The city must now show its one-gun carry limit and 90-day handgun purchase wait fit the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.
- Plaintiffs Charles Mills, Craig Sotomayor, and Braden Holliday originally sued in August 2022 before Judge Jed Rakoff dismissed the case in December 2024.
- The appeals court held the Second Amendment’s plain text covers carrying multiple firearms, rejecting the city’s founding-era single-shot argument.
- No rule was struck down, and the court said it did not predict whether the city could ultimately justify its restrictions historically.
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
NEW YORK, NY — Three gun owners challenging New York City’s one-gun carry limit, its 90-day wait between handgun purchases, and its old two-handgun cap on carry licenses got those claims back on Tuesday. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled that a federal judge was wrong to throw them out and sent them back to the district court. There, the city will have to show each rule fits the nation’s historical tradition of gun regulation.
The plaintiffs are Charles Mills of Queens, Craig Sotomayor of Nassau County, and Braden Holliday of the Bronx. They sued in August 2022, and U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff dismissed the entire case on Dec. 5, 2024. Judge Reena Raggi wrote the opinion in Mills v. New York City, joined by Judges Debra Ann Livingston and Michael Park. The full opinion is below.
Read the Second Circuit opinion in Mills v. New York City (PDF)
Mills holds a city premises license and a city carry license. He has registered multiple handguns to the premises license, but city rules let him register only two to his carry license and carry only one on his person at a time. He says that without those rules he would routinely carry a second, backup handgun for self-defense. He also says he would have bought a Glock from a Queens gun shop if not for the 90-day rule. Sotomayor holds a New York State carry license plus a city special license, which lets non-residents with valid carry licenses carry in the city, and he challenges the same rules. Holliday says he could not afford the city’s $340 license application fee and $88.50 fingerprinting fee.
The case turns on the Supreme Court’s Bruen test. Step one asks whether the Second Amendment’s plain text covers the conduct a rule regulates. If it does, step two puts the burden on the government to show the rule is “consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” Rakoff stopped at step one.
He reasoned that none of the rules “operates to permanently deprive applicants of their right to own and carry firearms.” The panel rejected that outright, holding that “nothing in the text draws a temporary/permanent distinction with respect to the right to keep and bear arms.” The panel also found Rakoff put the wrong burden on the plaintiffs. At step one, they only had to plausibly allege that a rule restricts conduct the Second Amendment covers, not show the rules are “foreclosed by the text of the Second Amendment.”
On the one-gun carry limit, the court went to the word “Arms.” “Just as the plain language of the Second Amendment affords a right to “keep . . . Arms” in the plural, so it affords a right to “bear Arms” in the plural,” Raggi wrote. The city argued that founding-era guns were single-shot, so nobody would have understood the amendment to cover carrying more than one. The panel answered that “the need for reloading after every shot might have made it more likely that an 18th-century individual would carry multiple firearms.”
On the 90-day rule, the city acknowledged its purpose is to slow “the pace of additional firearm acquisitions.” The panel held that “the 90-day rule serves categorically to limit the acquisition and, therefore, the possession and carry, of multiple firearms.” The city says the rule deters straw buyers. “Perhaps so,” the court wrote, but whether that purpose fits historical tradition is a step-two question.
The two-handgun cap on carry licenses was repealed in August 2024, so only Mills’s claim for money damages over past harm survives. Combined with state law making it a crime to carry a handgun not registered to a carry license, the panel said the cap “effectively prevented Mills from carrying all but two of his lawfully owned handguns for self-defense.” For a gun owner with a serious carry mindset, a backup gun is a reasonable choice. The court treated carrying one as conduct the Second Amendment covers.
The plaintiffs did not win everything. The panel agreed they lacked standing, meaning they had not shown an actual injury from the rule, to challenge the city’s purchase-authorization rule, its handgun-registration rule, and its dealer reporting requirements. It also upheld the dismissal of the fee challenge. The city charges $340 for a license and again every three years to renew, while most of the rest of the state caps the fee at $10. The panel said its 2013 decision in Kwong v. Bloomberg, which upheld these same fees, controls, and that Holliday offered no facts about his finances to back up his claim that he could not pay.
More from USA Carry:
None of this strikes down any rule. “This is not to conclude that the challenged rules are necessarily unconstitutional,” Raggi wrote, and the court said it does “not here predict whether or how the government might carry that burden.” Rakoff had written that the claims would “likely fail” at step two. The panel called that “more suggestive than conclusory” and said it expects the district court to do the “particularized historical analysis” Bruen requires.
I will continue tracking this case as it goes back to the district court.
