One of the aftereffects of the United States Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in NYSRPA v. Bruen was the ire expressed by antigun lawmakers, executives and judges, which manifested as an outright unwillingness to respect the Court’s mandate. New York State Governor Kathy Hochul, for instance, immediately responded with a bizarre statement (“we’re not going to cede our rights that easily”) and called a special session of the legislature to enact more gun control in a middle-of-the-night rush, to make it even more difficult to lawfully possess guns in the state.
One result is the gun licensing requirements in New York’s Nassau County, which currently require furnishing character references, a state driving record history, mental health and criminal history disclosure (regardless of disposition or whether the case was sealed or “nullified by operation of law”), 18 hours of training, a $200 nonrefundable application/renewal fee, a notarized letter confirming that all adults who reside with the applicant are aware the applicant will be securing a gun in the residence, and the applicant otherwise demonstrating “that no good cause exists for the denial of such license.”
All this, it seems, is still not enough. Nassau County has resorted to suspending licenses because of the status of persons other than the licensee, and imposing even more extreme demands, like disclosure of a third party’s medical records.
Federal courts in New York State have recently halted this extralegal extension of the licensing rules, with a recent decision holding that the county can’t make the status of an unlicensed family member a factor in whether the pistol licenses of two law-abiding individuals remain in good standing.
Christine and David Ganz were residents of Nassau County and had, since 2020, held New York State pistol licenses issues by the county police department’s Pistol License Section (PLS). In February 2024, their daughter, a student at a Long Island college, was admitted to a Massachusetts hospital for mental health treatment. Much later, in September, another patient at that hospital contacted the college to claim that the daughter had drawn “threatening images.” The Nassau County Police Department (NCPD) transported the daughter to a medical facility and informed her college. The daughter denied depicting any type of shooting or threat.
Although the campus police were handling the investigation into any threat to the school, NCPD officers investigated the Ganzs due to their pistol licenses. A supervisor “verified that [the Ganzs’] weapons were secured in a safe and that their daughter did not have access to them,” and another officer determined that “since there was ‘no direct message threatening a shooting,’ he saw no issue with” the Ganzs retaining possession of their secured guns. However, NCPD Investigator David Cafarella suspended their licenses soon after, citing a “volatile mental situation” where a household member had been hospitalized for mental health treatment, and because the Ganzs failed to notify the PLS of the hospitalization.
NY State law requires “good moral character” of licensees and authorizes license suspension or revocation at any time with a concurrent requirement to surrender firearms. Nassau County’s policy was to allow suspension for “any domestic situation involving a licensee where violence is threatened or alleged to have occurred or the existence of a volatile domestic situation,” or a failure to report, within three days, that the licensee or a member of the licensee’s household “receives professional treatment for mental health issues.” The mere fact that a household member received mental health treatment, though, did not automatically warrant suspension.
Cafarella did not speak with the daughter or the patient making the accusation, and at no time was it ever alleged that the guns on the premises were accessible by anyone other than the licensees. Cafarella demanded the Ganzs obtain a letter from their daughter’s treating psychologist that specified the actual diagnosis and that that the doctor had “no objection to firearms being in the house.” He also recommended that the Ganzs sign an “acknowledgement of wrongdoing” as a condition of having their licenses reinstated, which they refused to do. Cafarella testified that even if the daughter was present at the Ganz home only a couple of times a month, there was still a concern that she could access the guns, but he also testified that he did not consider the licensees to be “dangerous” or “threats to public safety.”
After unsuccessfully requesting that their licenses be reinstated, the Ganzs sued in federal court in April 2025, alleging violations of their Second Amendment rights arising from the license policy and its enforcement. The Ganzs’ licenses remained suspended until late November 2025, meaning all of their firearms had to be surrendered to an FFL and they were prohibited from acquiring any others during that time.
The PLS maintained the suspensions were justified because the plaintiffs failed to report the hospitalization, provide a letter from their daughter’s mental-health specialist, and disclose their daughter’s mental health history.
The scenario presents a plethora of alarming questions, not the least of which are whether the information about the alleged threat (setting in motion the entire process) had even come from a credible source or been verified in any meaningful way, or how the suspensions were justified when the responsible officials confirmed that the guns were properly secured and inaccessible and that the licensees posed no danger.
The court proceeded to the second step of the Bruen analysis, as there was no dispute as to step one, that the possession of handguns for self-defense fell squarely within the protection of the Second Amendment. The court was guided by rulings in other cases, notably a very similar Nassau County case decided in July, Wysocki v. Nassau County (E.D.N.Y. July 7, 2026).
There, the court found the county defendants presented “zero evidence that the PLS’s actions are consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation. They provide no citation to law, tradition, or any other evidence, nor do they provide a particular historical analogy to match the practices employed against the Wysockis” (emphasis in original). The additional requirements the NCPD imposed as conditions for reinstatement in that case (letters from mental health practitioners and the purchases of particular kinds of safes) were “not based on any policy or laws, but on requirements of Defendants’ own-making,” all being “conduct [that] is a plain violation of the Second Amendment.”
Unsurprisingly, the Ganz court also concluded that the defendants failed to discharge their burden under Bruen by failing “to identify a single historical analogue” that would support “automatically suspend[ing] a license when it is based on a cohabitant’s existence of a volatile situation and not that of the licensee.” A “reasonable inquiry” on whether a licensee meets a “good moral character” standard “is not connected to a cohabitant’s mental health circumstances,” and the failure to provide documentation from their daughter’s mental health professional could not support suspension when the licensees themselves had already been found to pose no threat.
The court treated the lawsuit as an as-applied challenge, meaning the ruling was confined to the individuals concerned. Although the license suspensions were unconstitutional, the court declined to grant an injunction as the licenses had been reinstated and an adequate remedy (a damages claim) existed to address the 13-month deprivation of the plaintiffs’ rights.
As reported by Reason magazine, there’s now a thoughtful article examining Wysocki and similar cases written by firearms attorney (and NRA Board member) Jonathan S. Goldstein, who coined the term “derivative disarmament” to describe the unconstitutional suspension of innocent Person A’s gun rights as a function of Person B’s condition or status.
There is no historical analogue for “derivative disarmament” based on a family or household member’s status. The United States Supreme Court has consistently held, in cases like United States v. Rahimi and United States v. Hemani, that historical gun laws require objective, individualized dangerousness, rather than a generalized threat by association.
The alternative – allowing the government to make broad designations of groups as “dangerous” and so remove their members’ gun rights – would, the Hemani Court said, empower the government to gut the Second Amendment entirely. Most importantly, as the Goldstein article points out, “[m]ental illness under a family roof is not unprecedented; it is among the oldest facts of domestic life. The founders legislated about dangerous persons at length, and about the mentally ill in particular, without once reaching the arms of the people those persons lived with.”
What this illustrates (yet again) is that the real objective of gun control is not danger control but curtailing the rights of decent law-abiding citizens. Disarming those who haven’t engaged in any conduct to disqualify them from possessing firearms (or retaining or obtaining a license) is just another way to negate constitutional rights in the name of a nebulous phantom of “public safety.”
As the Goldstein article concludes, the Constitution does not allow a “robbing Peter to pay Paul” tradeoff where the state “spends one citizen’s rights to purchase another citizen’s safety, and it has never permitted disarmament by association.”
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