MANHATTAN (CN) — A group of New York City gun buyers asked a federal appeals court on Tuesday to reinstate their Second Amendment challenge against the state’s administrative gun licensing requirements, which they claim infringe on their constitutional right to keep and bear arms.

Charles Mills, Craig Sotomayor, and Braden Holliday sued New York City in 2023, claiming regulations like the city’s 90-day waiting period to purchase firearms, background checks and the ban on possessing a backup concealed handgun limit are “absolute bar — even if temporarily — to their right to have and bear arms.”

Holliday, a Bronx resident, separately challenged the city’s imposition of purportedly exorbitant application and renewal fees as a restriction on his ability to possess arms.

He says New York City’s licensing and renewal fees, at $428.50, “grossly exceed” the $10 statutory cap imposed on every other jurisdiction in state, with the exception of Nassau County on Long Island.

Their case was thrown out at the motion to dismiss stage in December 2024 by U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff, who concluded that “none of the predominantly administrative regulations here operates to permanently deprive applicants of their right to own and carry firearms.”

Appealing to the Second Circuit, the gun owners claim Rakoff misapplied and misunderstood the text, history and tradition analysis under Bruen to be applied in Second Amendment challenges, and the viability of constitutional challenges to “exorbitant licensing fees.”

“Reversal of the district court decision is required here, because at the 12(b)(6) [motion to dismiss] stage Second Amendment challenges, the issue is only whether the law is being challenged affect the plaintiff’s right to acquire, possess and or carry arms,” attorney Amy Bellantoni told the three-judge Second Circuit panel during oral arguments on Tuesday morning.

Bellantoni told the panel New York City’s administrative constraints on gun purchasing “go right to the very heart of the plain text of the Second Amendment, which is the right to keep and bear, to have and possess, and right to acquire is necessarily wrapped up within the right to possess, because without the ability to acquire, then you have no possession and no carriage, you have no defense.”

U.S. Circuit Michael Park, a Donald Trump appointee, queried what the injury from the licensing fee and registration fees entails for gun buyers.

“We’re not at the stage right now yet where the city needs to justify requiring a permission slip, but I will say that the harm there is that without the ability to acquire at the point of purchase, my client has been harmed,” Bellantoni said. “He’s not been able to acquire the handgun and carry it and possess it for self-defense at that moment.”

Park also asked how mandatory waiting period was different from a presumptively permissible administrative delay for a background check.

Bellantoni said a waiting period of five to fifteen minutes to run the buyers’ background check would be sufficient.

“Now, 30 days, it’s not reasonable,” she said. “What are we waiting for? They’re already eligible law-abiding people, and now they have to be like children. You know, wait until they get permission to take their property out of the store. It makes it’s it makes no sense.”

Jeremy W. Shweder for the New York City Law Department meanwhile urged the panel to affirm the lower court’s dismissal, arguing the gun owners lack standing or their claims are moot.

“Plaintiffs have not adequately alleged that there are no set of circumstances under which the challenge regulations would be valid,” he told the Second Circuit on Tuesday. “Plaintiffs essentially argue that they satisfy their burden at step one merely by saying that there exists a firearm regulation and then pointing to the Second Amendment.”

Shweder said the buyers had not plausibly argued that the 90-day waiting period, an anti-trafficking measure, infringes their acquisition to the point of infringing the keeping or bearing of arms for self-defense.

“Stepping back, the anti-trafficking law is not a bar on the acquisition of firearms,” the city wrote in its appellate brief. “It is not a bar on keeping or bearing firearms; and it is not a bar on where firearms can be carried. It simply regulates the pace of additional firearm acquisitions by requiring someone who has just acquired a handgun — and may already have many more — to wait 90 days before purchasing an additional one.”

The city noted the Second Circuit has already upheld the constitutionality of the $340 licensing fees in Kwong v. Bloomberg, and that Bruen specifically contemplates licensing fees as long as they are not so exorbitant as to deny the right to keep and bear arms.

U.S. Circuit Judges Debra Ann Livingston and Reena Raggi, both appointed by George W. Bush, rounded out the panel, which did not indicate how or when it would rule.