I used to live in Pennsylvania. In Pennsylvania, owning a handgun is a bit like owning a toaster. You buy it, you fill out a background check form at the counter, you wait about fifteen minutes, and you walk out the door with your toaster. Nobody calls you. Nobody sends you a plastic card. Nobody asks you to reapply for the privilege of owning your toaster every few years.
Then I moved to New York.
I now live in what I have come to understand is, functionally, the Manhattan Project of civilian bureaucracy, if the Manhattan Project’s primary output had been paperwork instead of nuclear weapons, and also somehow took longer.
I currently have four pistols. They are sitting in a safe at my parents’ house in Pennsylvania, several hundred miles away, patiently waiting for me to become a person the State of New York considers trustworthy enough to reunite with my own property. This series is going to document that process, in real time, as it happens to me: mistakes, waiting rooms, and all. Consider it a “work in progress” travelogue, except instead of visiting exotic countries, I’m visiting county clerk’s offices.
Here’s the map of the road ahead, as best I can determine after actual research (and re-research, after apparently losing an entire prior conversation about this to the AI equivalent of the Bermuda Triangle, a story for another day).
Step 1: The 18-Hour Permission Slip
Before New York will even consider letting me have a pistol permit, I need to complete a state-mandated firearms safety course: 16 hours of classroom instruction, plus 2 hours of live-fire range time, taught by an officially sanctioned instructor.
Eighteen hours. For context, that’s longer than it takes to get certified to operate some actual industrial machinery. It is also, I will admit through gritted teeth, longer than the fifteen-minute background check that got me my first handgun in Pennsylvania, by a factor of about seventy-two.
I am not against safety training. I am somewhat against the fact that this requirement didn’t exist in its current form until 2022, which means the state looked at its old, shorter course and concluded the problem with New York wasn’t crime, it was insufficiently credentialed toaster owners.
Step 2: Apply, Get Fingerprinted, and Then Wait. And Wait. And, You Guessed It, Wait.
Once I’ve got my course certificate, I apply for my actual pistol permit through the county: clerk’s office, sheriff’s department, and eventually a judge all get a say, because apparently my ability to own a handgun requires the same number of signatures as a peace treaty.
This step includes fingerprinting, a background investigation, and reference checks, after which I am told to expect my permit back in… and here’s where I want to be honest with you, dear reader, because I almost lied to myself about this before I fact-checked it.
I had it in my head this would take “a month or two.” I have since learned, from multiple county government websites that I did not previously respect enough, that the realistic timeline is four to nine months, with some counties openly admitting it can stretch past a year. One anonymous forum veteran, the kind of grizzled internet stranger who has clearly filed this paperwork more times than is healthy, casually mentioned waits of “over a year” like it was just the weather.
So somewhere between “a month or two” and “possibly longer than a human pregnancy” is where I currently sit, permit application in hand, watching the mailbox with the quiet, hollow-eyed patience of a man who has accepted his fate.
(Future update: I will report back on how long this actually takes me, because apparently I am now running a controlled experiment on state efficiency, whether I wanted to or not.)
Step 3: The Card Appears
Assuming I survive Step 2 emotionally intact, I eventually receive a plastic concealed carry permit card. This is the New York equivalent of a diploma, except instead of hanging it on my wall, I will need it constantly for everything that follows, because owning my own already-legally-purchased pistols turns out to be an ongoing subscription service, not a one-time purchase.
Step 4: Shipping My Own Property to Myself, With Paperwork
Here’s the part that still makes me laugh, in the specific way you laugh at things that are also making you a little furious.
Once I have my NY permit, I don’t just drive down to my parents’ place, load up my pistols, and drive home. Instead, the plan is to take them to a licensed dealer in Pennsylvania, who will ship them, federally licensed dealer to federally licensed dealer, to a gun shop here in New York. I then pay transfer fees and shipping charges to send my own guns, which I already legally own, from one state to another, as though they were merchandise I’d never met before.
I’ll admit: I went down a rabbit hole trying to figure out if this step is strictly required for firearms you already owned before moving, versus firearms you’re newly purchasing. The honest answer, after actual research, is that it’s genuinely a gray area, and even longtime New York gun owners argue about it in forums with the intensity usually reserved for religious schisms. But it’s the standard, safest, most commonly followed path, the one that won’t get a county clerk giving you that look, so that’s the road I’m taking.
Step 5: The Amendment, the Fee, and the Sacred Coupon
Once my pistols land at the New York dealer, I take paperwork from that shop back to the county clerk’s office and file what’s officially called an “amendment” to my permit, because apparently my relationship status with my own guns needs to be legally amended, like a prenup.
I pay another small fee. The clerk records the serial numbers of each pistol onto my file, and eventually mails me back an updated plastic card, new serial numbers embossed on the back, along with something the county literally calls a “coupon.”
I want to sit with that for a second. A coupon. As though I’ve earned 15% off my own property.
Step 6: Redeeming the Coupon (No, Really)
Here’s the final twist: that coupon isn’t just a keepsake. It’s what I actually have to hand the New York dealer before they’re legally allowed to release my pistols to me. So the order of operations is register the guns first, receive government-issued permission slip second, and only then am I allowed to walk into a shop and collect the property I have owned, in some cases, for years.
Where This Leaves Me
As of this post, I’m just past the one-month mark of living in New York, staring down the barrel (pun very much intended) of an 18-hour course, a wait that could stretch anywhere from four months to “possibly over a year,” and a multi-step handoff between two states’ worth of licensed dealers just to be reunited with property I already legally own.
I’ll be posting updates as I actually go through each of these: the real wait times, the real forms, the real moments where the paperwork wins and I don’t. If you’ve been through this yourself, especially in New York, I’d genuinely love to hear your experience in the comments. Misery loves company, and apparently so does paperwork.
At the time of writing this, my plan is to get my driver’s license converted over to NY and my vehicles re-registered, insured, and inspected in NY, which I could honestly make an entire companion article out of. Spoiler alert: it’s a three-page checklist. We’ll see how that goes.
Next up: Step 1, the 18-hour course itself. I’ll let you know if “live fire range time” turns out to be as fun as it sounds, or just one more box to check on the world’s longest permission slip.
A quick note before you dive into the comments: I welcome disagreement, healthy debate, and “well actually” corrections on the details. What I won’t abide is personal attacks, threats, or anything aimed at other commenters rather than the ideas. Keep it civil and light and it stays open for everyone.