On December 8, 2023, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit decided Antonyuk v. Chiumento, a case which challenged many provisions of New York’s law regulating the public carrying of firearms, the Concealed Carry Improvement Act (“CCIA”), based on the Second Amendment.

One challenged provision of the CCIA related to its requirement that an applicant for a concealed-carry license attend an in-person meeting with a licensing officer and disclose, among other things, “a list of all former and current social media accounts from the preceding three years.” Plaintiffs (several individuals, one church, and two advocacy groups each claiming to be adversely affected by the requirements of the CCIA) moved for a preliminary injunction to enjoin enforcement of this provision. The district court granted the preliminary injunction as to this provision, holding that the CCIA violated the Second Amendment by conditioning the issuance of a license on the disclosure of the applicant’s former and current social media accounts for the preceding three years. The district court found this requirement of the law lacked a sufficient basis in the “Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation,” one of the analytical steps a court must consider as set forth in the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n, Inc. v. Bruen.

On appeal, the Second Circuit affirmed the preliminary injunction against enforcement of the CCIA’s social media requirement.  The court found that “requiring applicants to disclose even pseudonymous names under which they post online imposes an impermissible infringement on Second Amendment rights that is unsupported by analogues in the historical record and moreover presents serious First Amendment concerns” because, the court noted, the First Amendment protects the right to speak anonymously.

The Second Circuit reached this decision even though the court acknowledged that the CCIA did not require applicants to provide a password to their accounts, make their posts accessible to the public or reveal non-public posts to the licensing officer.  The court’s overarching concern was “the absence of any analogous disclosure requirement from the historical record combined with the constitutional interests implicated by the mandatory disclosure of online pseudonyms.”

It remains to be seen if the defendants will appeal the Second Circuit’s Antonyuk decision to the Supreme Court, which is already hearing several Second Amendment cases this term, including one that also involves the First Amendment.

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