Licenses Delayed, Rights Denied: How Contemporary Firearm Carry Licensing Regimes Continue to Violate the Second Amendment
Introduction
The Supreme Court’s decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen was meant to vindicate the Second Amendment’s text and historical traditions against discretionary state licensing schemes that denied ordinary citizens their constitutional right to bear arms in public. Yet three years after Bruen, a predictable pattern has emerged: jurisdictions hostile to gun rights have responded not with compliance, but with sophisticated resistance. In these states, the right recognized in Bruen exists on paper but remains largely inaccessible in practice. These states have transformed federalism’s promise of experimentation into what can only be described as laboratories in denying constitutional rights. The tools are facially neutral—processing times, training requirements, documentation standards—but their cumulative effect is anything but. When examined systematically, these measures reveal a deliberate strategy of administrative nullification that courts have been slow to recognize and even slower to remedy.
This article documents the methods by which certain outlier jurisdictions erode Bruen‘s command; and second, proposes a concrete solution that would restore meaningful access to the right to bear arms. Central to this proposal is the simple but powerful insight that states move quickly when they are motivated to do so. What is needed, then, is a realignment of incentives that makes unlawful obstruction costlier than constitutional compliance.
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