New Yorkers fill gun classes as concealed carry applications surge

This story was published in partnership with The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom covering gun violence in America. Sign up for its newsletters here.

In New York City, once proudly unwelcoming to guns, residents are arming up.

Since June 2022, when a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision forced state lawmakers to relax longstanding restrictions, tens of thousands of New Yorkers have sought permits to carry concealed weapons outside the home. The number of permit applications submitted per month has risen nearly tenfold in the past three years, according to an analysis of New York Police Department data by THE CITY and The Trace.

This boom could portend a city where legally carrying a firearm becomes, as in most other parts of the country, commonplace.

New York state requires every would-be gun carrier to go through a “safety training course” involving 16 hours of instruction, a written proficiency exam, and a live-fire assessment. That’s more training hours than any state but Maryland and Illinois requires, according to legal experts.

But New York hasn’t standardized the classes beyond outlining a handful of topics to touch on. As a result, a growing group of gun aficionados have stepped in to develop and run them. A person who passes a pair of National Rifle Association training courses can become a “duly authorized instructor.”

Few instructors are busier than Lance Dashefsky. The 57-year-old has more reviews on the U.S. Concealed Carry Association’s website than anyone else in the New York City area, earning a five-star rating. Most weekends, he is helping residents get locked and loaded.

On a drizzly Sunday morning in October, he laid out bagels and lox in an empty youth center in East Harlem to which a friend had lent him access. Eleven students were signed up for the training, which would be divided over two weekends, and they showcased the breadth of interest. An accountant from Jamaica, Queens, had heard about the class through a co-worker. A teacher from Brooklyn learned about it from her husband, who had taken it first. A rangy equity trader from the West Village was referred by his landlord. “I don’t advertise anymore,” Dashefsky said. “It’s self-advertising.”

Short, bespectacled, and with a boyish face, Dashefsky does not project the air of a gun rights firebrand. He grew up on Long Island, where his high school rifle team introduced him to shooting. After earning a degree in business administration, he moved to New York City for a series of white-collar roles in accounting, publishing, and finance. His current day job is at a firm that assists highly skilled immigrants obtain U.S. visas. But he never set aside his passion for firearms — and for helping other people learn how to use them.

Before 2022, appetite for this service in New York City was slim. State laws made it all but impossible for people to get concealed carry permits, as authorities had discretion to reject applicants with little explanation. In practice, permits were largely held by business leaders, politicians, and celebrities.

But in 2019, the New York State Rifle and Pistol Association filed a lawsuit against the state, culminating in the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 Bruen decision, written by Justice Clarence Thomas, which struck down such restrictions and extended the Second Amendment to gun carrying outside the home.

The decision’s originalist logic, in which gun laws are only constitutional if attorneys show a “historical precedent” for them, overturned restrictions on gun carrying in a half-dozen other states and invalidated scores of other gun laws, too.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul called the court’s decision “reckless and reprehensible” and convened an extraordinary session of the state Legislature to strengthen screening criteria and training requirements for what was expected to be a torrent of new gun carriers. She signed the measures into law on July 1, 2022. Going forward, any eligible resident who completed the mandatory training could get a permit.

The trickle of interest immediately became a flood. NYPD data shows that applications for carry permits spiked that summer and rose to new highs after the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel stirred fears among New York City’s Jewish population.

Since the law changed, more than 17,000 New Yorkers have been approved for permits, and over 8,000 additional applications are pending as of Oct. 1. (For comparison, fewer than 4,000 New Yorkers had permits in 2011, according to a New York Times analysis.)

Many of the students in Dashefsky’s class said they were seeking gun permits for self-defense. Jamie, a 30-something attorney from the Upper East Side who declined to give her last name, said she was scared walking alone at night in parts of Brooklyn. Another student, a transit worker, said he wanted to “properly” protect himself within the law. The stockbroker said he felt a responsibility “to be prepared.”

Others had a different mindset. Nick, a 30-something mathematician who also declined to provide his last name, said he keeps scores of firearms at a home in southwestern Pennsylvania. He wanted a permit to more easily transport them to and from his place in New York City, where the violent crime rate is plummeting toward historic lows. “I’ve personally never felt unsafe in any way in New York, and I’m always a little bit surprised by this sort of culture of fear,” he said.

The group wasn’t insulated from attitudes elsewhere in the country. Bob Rutledge, a 77-year-old student dapperly dressed in a suit and tie, said his relatives in Georgia and Mississippi have guns. “I feel left out,” he said.

Dashefsky estimates that in the last year he guided about 250 students through the process, who generally paid him around $700 each to complete all the required components. He now earns more from this gun training sideline than his day job, he says.

He also teaches private classes, like a recent one to executives of a global retail firm at their office in Manhattan. He opined that recent high-profile incidents — like the December assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a Midtown Manhattan sidewalk, and the July mass shooting that killed four people in a Park Avenue office building — had set the corporate world on edge. “They’re afraid of people just coming into the building and shooting it up,” Dashefsky said. “A turnstile isn’t stopping anybody.”

Between Dashefsky’s gun-training side hustle, leading his co-op board, frequent volunteering with the police reserve, and membership in the Freemasons, there’s little time left for leisure. He’s unmarried and lives alone, but his phone constantly buzzes with texts from former or future students. On a recent day, he had 1,507 unanswered voicemails. “It’s fun,” he said simply.

As the East Harlem class unfolded, Dashefsky went through a lengthy Powerpoint. He demonstrated the basics of gun safety with a yellow mockup pistol and walked through the mechanics of a real one, but frequently digressed.

By law, the training course must cover state and federal gun laws, which are complex and can be confusing to navigate. Dashefsky took this as an opportunity to criticize them, particularly how the state continues to prohibit gun carrying in “sensitive places” like subways and summer camps, and how it requires ammunition-buyers to undergo background checks. “It’s just stupidity,” he said.

Dashefsky made plain that the course would not resolve every ambiguity of how to best or lawfully use a gun. “All these rules are situational.”

Is it good or bad to use a safe to store a gun? “It depends.”

A student asked how he’d respond if someone entered the classroom and menaced the group with a knife. “I’d shoot him,” Dashefsky said. “That doesn’t mean you have to.”

He also made frequent jabs at New York’s politicians, whom he called “Mayor De Bozo,” “King Hochul” and “Mam-commie.” The students took it in stride.

The lecture was running deep into the lunch hour when Dashefsky reached a mandated section on the risks a gun poses to its owner. “We’re going to cruise through suicide prevention,” he announced, wrapping it 10 minutes later. Scientific research showing that people who have handguns are three times more likely to kill themselves went unmentioned.

As afternoon gave way to evening, Dashefsky’s enthusiasm seemed undimmed. “This is my favorite part of the course,” he said, advancing to a slide titled “Violent encounters and their aftermath” that detailed strategies for protecting yourself from liability after you shoot someone in self-defense. He advised students to call 911 for an ambulance but recommended a precautionary approach with police. “Don’t answer any questions,” he said.

At the end of the day, everyone breezed through the open-note, multiple-choice exam, scoring above the minimum 80% required to pass.

The next weekend, many of the students finished their training at Nassau County Rifle & Pistol Range, a squat concrete building about 20 miles east of Manhattan. In the entryway, a wire rack prominently displayed Dashefsky’s business cards, among those of dozens of other people who were now making a living training soon-to-be gun carriers.

Dashefsky wore a neon yellow cap and was stooped under the weight of a bright-red bulletproof vest that denoted him “chief range safety officer.” On the firing line, he seemed possessed of an easier command than in the classroom. His students crowded before him while he gave a safety briefing, and then announced, “Shooters, load and make ready.” Gunfire drowned out further conversation.

New York state requires applicants to fire at a target from 12 feet and hit it four out of five times. “A blind person can pass this,” Dashefsky had said earlier. (The requirement is actually more strenuous than Florida’s, where applicants need only discharge a firearm in the direction of the target, and some trainers have passed students after they fired a single round into a bucket of sand.)

Jamie, the attorney, missed her first shot with a .38 but steadied her hand and nailed the rest. “I think I need to practice more before I get one,” she said.

Even if she turns in her paperwork tomorrow, it could be over a year before she can legally carry. NYPD data shows the department has yet to render a decision on thousands of applications, some submitted as far back as the summer of 2024. Asked for comment, a Police Department spokesperson cited factors that were beyond its control, including applicants failing to submit required materials or show up for fingerprinting.

In Los Angeles County in September, the U.S. Justice Department filed a lawsuit against the Sheriff’s Department for issuing gun permits too slowly, alleging it had infringed on residents’ Second Amendment rights “through a deliberate pattern of unconscionable delay.”

Eric Ruben, an associate professor at the Dedman School of Law at Southern Methodist University and an expert in constitutional law, said, “I wouldn’t be surprised to see something similar in New York City unless there’s an explanation for the backlog.”

As the firing wound down at the Nassau County range, Gleb Postel carefully put away the personalized certificate he’d received for completing the course. A U.S. Navy veteran, he said the class had been educational. “A lot of things that I thought were legal are not, and then vice versa, a lot of things that I thought were illegal are not.”

He hadn’t wanted a gun after leaving the service. “I never want to shoot anybody. I don’t even like to go hunting.” But the social upheaval he saw during the pandemic in 2020 prompted him to reconsider. “If I never use it, I’ll be glad.”