Second Circuit Revives Challenge to NYC Handgun Limits

Last updated November 2026 · By Nick Hall, reads the opinions and code sections behind New York City handgun licensing for USA Gun Shop readers

Quick take: A federal appeals court just put New York City’s one-handgun carry limit and its 90-day wait between handgun purchases back in play. The Second Circuit said a judge was wrong to throw the challenges out at the first step of Bruen, so now the city has to defend the rules with history. Nothing has been struck down yet, and the rules still apply today.

• Ruling: On November 10, 2026, the Second Circuit vacated the dismissal of Second Amendment claims against NYC’s one-gun carry rule, its 90-day purchase rule and a repealed two-gun carry license cap.
• Court: Judge Reena Raggi wrote for a unanimous panel with Judges Livingston and Park, in Mills v. New York City, No. 24-3308.
• Why it matters: The court held that carrying more than one handgun is conduct the Second Amendment’s text covers, and that the 90-day rule meaningfully constrains that right.
• What’s next: The case goes back to Judge Jed Rakoff in the Southern District of New York, where the city must show each rule fits the nation’s historical tradition of gun regulation.

Read the headlines and you could walk away thinking New York City lost its handgun limits. It did not. What gun owners won on November 10 is the right to make the city defend those limits in court, and that is worth more than it sounds. I read all 40 pages of the opinion, and here is what it does and what it leaves exactly where it was.

Table of Contents

What the Second Circuit Did in Mills v. New York City

The disposition line is five words long: “AFFIRMED IN PART; VACATED AND REMANDED IN PART.” The case was argued on November 18, 2025 and decided on November 10, 2026, almost a year later. You can read the full Mills v. New York City opinion on CourtListener.

Three claims come back to life. The first targets 38 R.C.N.Y. § 5-22(a)(7), which limits a licensee to one handgun “on their person at any time.” The second targets N.Y.C. Admin. Code § 10-302.1(a) and (b), the rule that stops anyone buying more than one handgun in a 90-day period.

The third is a rule that no longer exists. The old version of 38 R.C.N.Y. § 5-25(d)(4) let a carry license list at most two handguns, and the city repealed it on August 12, 2024, while the case was pending. That claim survives only as Charles Mills’ bid for retrospective damages.

Judge Reena Raggi wrote the opinion for a panel with Judges Livingston and Park. There is no dissent and no separate concurrence. And the court was careful to say what it was not deciding: “This is not to conclude that the challenged rules are necessarily unconstitutional.”

The Three Plaintiffs and the Rules They Ran Into

The suit was filed on August 23, 2022, two months after Bruen. The three plaintiffs are New York State residents, and each one hit a different part of the city’s licensing machine.

Charles Mills of Queens holds both a city premises license and a city carry license. He has more handguns on the premises license than the carry license would take, and carrying a gun that is not on your carry license is a Class A misdemeanor under N.Y. Penal Law § 400.00(15). He says that without the rules he would carry a second, backup handgun, and that he would have bought a Glock from a Queens gun shop if the 90-day clock had not been running.

Craig Sotomayor lives in Nassau County. He holds a New York State concealed carry license plus a city special license, the permit that lets nonresidents with valid outside licenses carry inside the five boroughs. He challenged the same carry and purchase limits.

Braden Holliday, a Bronx resident, never got a license at all. His claim was about money: the “mandatory $340 application fee and attendant $88.50 fingerprinting fee,” plus the $340 renewal every third year. That claim lost, and I will come back to why.

Why Plural Arms Is the Whole Ballgame

If you need a refresher, our Bruen decision explainer walks through the two-step test. Step one asks whether the Second Amendment’s plain text covers the conduct a rule regulates. If it does, the burden shifts, and the government has to show the rule is “consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

Judge Rakoff never got to step two. He dismissed the whole complaint on December 5, 2024, reasoning in part that none of the rules “operates to permanently deprive applicants of their right to own and carry firearms.” The panel rejected that flatly, holding that “nothing in the text draws a temporary/permanent distinction with respect to the right to keep and bear arms.”

It also said Rakoff put the wrong burden on the gun owners. They did not have to show the rules were “foreclosed by the text of the Second Amendment.” At step one, they only had to plausibly allege that a rule restricts conduct the text covers.

Then came the line that matters most. The amendment protects a right to keep and bear “Arms,” the panel said, not “an Arm.” It pointed to the plural wording the Supreme Court has used since Heller, and on two sister circuits: the Ninth Circuit in Nguyen v. Bonta (2025) and the D.C. Circuit in its 2015 Heller ruling on registration limits.

The city tried a history argument at step one. Founding-era guns were single-shot, it said, quoting a line that “all small arms [were then] single-shot weapons, requiring reloading by hand after every shot.” The panel was not impressed: “The premise does not ineluctably support the conclusion.” If anything, it said, single-shot guns may have made carrying more than one more likely.

The 90-day rule fell into the same trap. The city told the court the point of the rule is to slow “the pace of additional firearm acquisitions” and deter straw buyers. “Perhaps so,” Raggi wrote. Because the rules delay every purchase, “the rules materially constrain the right to keep and bear arms,” and whether the country has a tradition of that kind of metering is a step-two question. The Ninth Circuit made the same point in Nguyen, the case behind Los Angeles repealing its one-handgun-a-month rule: “delay itself is the purpose.”

What the Ruling Does Not Do

This is the part that gets lost. No rule has been struck down, and the court said it was not guessing how the city will do next: “We do not here predict whether or how the government might carry that burden.” Today a New York City licensee can still carry one handgun at a time and still buy one handgun per 90 days.

The fee challenge lost outright. The panel held it was foreclosed by Kwong v. Bloomberg, a 2013 Second Circuit case that upheld these exact fees. The city fee has been $340 since 2004, while the rest of the state, other than Nassau and Westchester Counties, caps license fees at ten dollars. Holliday’s claim that he could not afford it was “pleaded conclusorily,” with nothing about his finances.

The panel also affirmed the dismissal, for lack of standing, of the challenges to the purchase authorization rule, the handgun registration rule and the dealer reporting requirements. So the paperwork side of buying a handgun in the city is untouched.

Waiting periods in general are not on the table either. The court flagged a First Circuit case upholding a 72-hour wait to take possession of a purchased gun and said, “We need not decide how this court would view that particular rule.” The 90-day rule lost at step one because its stated purpose is to slow repeat purchases, not to give the city time to process paperwork.

Geography matters too. The Second Circuit covers New York, Connecticut and Vermont, so this reasoning binds federal trial courts in those three states and nowhere else. For everything else that applies to you, our New York gun laws guide is the place to start.

What Happens Next for New York City Gun Owners

The three revived claims go back to Judge Rakoff. In his 2024 ruling he said the claims would “likely fail” at step two, and the panel addressed that directly in a footnote, calling the remark “more suggestive than conclusory.” It added that it was “confident the district court will reach a final conclusion only after engaging in the particularized historical analysis required at Bruen step two.”

The city has options before that. Under Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 40, a party in a civil case like this one has 14 days after judgment is entered to ask for panel rehearing or rehearing en banc, unless the court changes the deadline. The Supreme Court is the other road.

The lawyers to watch are Amy L. Bellantoni for the plaintiffs and the office of Corporation Counsel Muriel Goode-Trufant for the city. The amicus lineup tells you how far this case reaches, with Paul Clement filing for the National Shooting Sports Foundation on the gun owners’ side and Everytown Law backing the city.

If the city wins at step two, the limits stand with a fresh judicial blessing. If it loses, New York City joins California in learning that a quota on how many guns you can buy or carry is a hard thing to find in 1791.

Nobody in Queens can carry a backup gun this week. But the city now has to explain why not.

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Related Reading

• New York Gun Laws (2026): CCIA, Pistol License, SAFE Act and Sensitive Locations
• Bruen Decision Explained: The History-and-Tradition Test
• Los Angeles Repeals Its One-Handgun-a-Month Rule
• DOJ Sues Minnesota Over 30-Day Handgun Purchase Wait
• New York Body Armor Ban Struck Down by Federal Judge
• US Gun Laws by State: 2026 Legal Directory